Plenty of products aren't made in one place. You send ingredients to a co-packer who cooks and blends them, truck the result to a second vendor for filling and pasteurizing, and land the finished cases at a 3PL — three vendors, two hand-offs, one product, and you own the goods the entire way. Until now, modelling that meant inventing the whole structure by hand: a work-in-progress SKU per hand-off, a recipe per stage, lot-tracking flags on every node, contractors, and a production order for each leg — roughly 25 minutes of setup, with several places to get the cost model quietly wrong.

Multi-stage co-manufacturing turns that into one guided flow. Tell SKU.io who does what and what they charge, and it builds the intermediate products, the per-stage recipes, and the vendor terms in a single transaction — then keeps them honest every time you run it.

Your accountant plans cash flow from your accounting file — and until the supplier's invoice arrives, an open purchase order is invisible there. You have committed the money, the goods are on their way, and the books show nothing. For businesses ordering weeks ahead of delivery, that gap can hide a large slice of upcoming spend.

Committed-spend billing closes it. Turn it on and every purchase order you submit posts a bill for its unbilled amount right away, so committed inventory spend appears in your books the moment you commit to it. Each committed bill then looks after itself: it shrinks as real supplier invoices are recorded against the order, and disappears entirely once the order is fully billed.

Every channel has a standard set of product fields, and then it has yours. The care instructions you added as a Shopify metafield. The country_of_manufacture and warranty_months attributes your Magento store has carried for years. That data is real, it's maintained, and until now SKU.io imported none of it — it read the fields every channel has and dropped everything else on the floor, leaving you to re-enter it by hand or accept a catalog that knows less than your storefront does. Channel attributes closes that gap. SKU.io now discovers the attributes your channel actually sends, shows you how many products carry each one and what the values look like, and lets you point them at any SKU product field — either once, when a product is first created, or on every sync, with drift detection watching for changes.

Importing a product from a channel has always been a one-time snapshot. Someone retitles a listing in Seller Central, swaps in a better photo, corrects a weight from pounds to grams — and SKU.io never hears about it. Months later your catalog and your channels have quietly drifted apart, and nobody can say which side is right. The usual workaround is a spreadsheet and a lot of squinting. Living Catalog replaces it: SKU.io now watches the content on your mapped listings, records exactly which fields changed on the channel side, and hands you a review queue instead of a mystery. Nothing is overwritten behind your back — you decide, per field, whether your catalog or the channel is the source of truth.

The same physical part often lives under two SKUs: the official part number customers search for, and the identical equivalent you actually keep on the shelf. Until now those orders just stalled — the listed SKU sat backordered while the interchangeable item was in stock a few feet away, and "fixing" it meant editing order lines by hand. Product substitutions links equivalent SKUs so those orders flow: swap a stalled line to the stocked substitute in one click, or select the whole backlog and release it at once. The customer still sees exactly what they ordered — the invoice and packing slip keep the original SKU — while the pick list tells your warehouse which part to actually pull.

If your team plans in Airtable — merchandising calendars, purchasing boards, ops trackers — keeping it in step with SKU.io has meant CSV round-trips or a paid middleware subscription that breaks the moment either side changes. The new Airtable integration removes the bridge entirely: connect your Airtable account and SKU.io syncs your operational data both ways, on a schedule or in near-real-time. Push products, inventory, orders, purchase orders, and suppliers into your own Airtable base — or let SKU.io build a ready-made base for you in one click — and when someone edits a safe field in Airtable, review the change before it updates your catalog. It's a first-party, two-way connector with nothing in the middle.

Your home dashboard used to be one fixed layout — the same handful of cards for everyone, whether you live in sales, purchasing, or the warehouse. Now it's yours to shape. Customizable dashboards let you add any of 100+ widgets — KPIs, trend charts, gauges, leaderboards and live activity — then drag, resize and arrange them exactly how you want. Keep separate dashboards for different jobs (an Overview, a Sales view, an Operations view) and switch between them with one click. Everything is drawn from your live data, so the moment a widget lands on your board it's already showing real numbers.

Your demand-planning forecast has always turned recent sales into a reorder quantity — but it treated every product as if it sold at one steady pace. A SKU that has tripled over the last quarter was still planned off its flat average, so you under-bought your fastest movers and over-bought the ones winding down. And when you wanted to plan for a promotion you'd run before, you had to eyeball last year's numbers and mentally scale them up. Trend-aware forecasting changes both: the baseline can now follow a product's trend instead of a flat mean, every recommendation shows exactly how it was built, and a promotion you measured once becomes a reusable lift that automatically scales with how much your business has grown.

Your suppliers rarely reach every one of your warehouses in the same number of days. The same vendor might land stock at your main warehouse in two weeks but take six by sea to a warehouse in another region — yet SKU.io applied a single lead time to every destination, so one of those reorder recommendations was always built on the wrong number. Per-warehouse lead times let you set a default lead time on a supplier and then override it for individual warehouses, and demand planning automatically uses the right one for each destination you forecast.

Your demand-planning forecast has always given you a reorder quantity — but not a way to tell whether that number was built on two years of steady sales or two days of noise. A brand-new SKU with almost no history looked exactly as authoritative as a proven bestseller, and once you exported the results, the reasoning behind each number disappeared. Forecast confidence fixes that: every recommendation now carries a confidence level, a likely range around the quantity, and a plain-English explanation of how it was calculated — right in the results table, in the calculation detail, and in the export you hand to finance.