Before Inventory Planner can calculate accurate purchase recommendations, you must configure the planning period for your variants. The planning period is comprised of the lead time and days of stock.

The lead time is the amount of time between placing a purchase order for your variant and receiving the variant into stock. It includes the time the vendor takes to produce the goods, as well as the shipping time. For example, if you place an order on January 1st and receive the products into stock on January 8th, your lead time is 7 days.

Lead times are usually supplied by your vendor, though you may prefer to set your own estimate. If in doubt, set a longer lead time.

The days of stock, or stock cover, is the amount of time you’d like to be able to keep inventory on hand without having to restock. For example, if you want to order enough stock for two weeks, your days of stock is 14 days.

Days of stock is determined by several factors such as storage space, expected turnover and product longevity.

In Inventory Planner Essentials, there are multiple ways to set a variant’s lead time and days of stock.

You can view and update the values in the Purchase screen. This can be done individually by entering new values and then clicking the Save button.

Alternatively, you can update multiple variants by selecting the items, then choosing Bulk actions > Set lead times / days of stock.

Then enter the new values and click Apply.

The final method is to inherit the settings from the vendor. This is useful if all products supplied by a vendor have the same lead time and/or days of stock. Go to the vendor record and click "Update variants" to apply the vendor’s defaults to all associated variants.

Learn more about assigning vendor defaults to variants here.

To generate accurate forecasts and purchase recommendations, you should also consider the following configuration: