45 posts tagged with "Purchasing"

Every catalog has products on the way out, and until now "discontinued" mostly meant remembering not to reorder something. Open purchase orders kept arriving, backorders kept piling up, the replacement product started with no sales history, and the leftover stock sat in the warehouse until someone noticed. Product lifecycle gives every product a state — Active, Phasing out or Discontinued, plus any of your own — and SKU.io acts on it: it stops reordering, shows you exactly what a change will affect before you confirm it, and gives you one place to watch the remaining stock sell through and clear it with markdowns or a closeout offer.

A customer orders a throw that's on your shelf and a table that's on preorder. The order can't ship until the table arrives, but the throw still comes off your shelf and sits there for weeks. Meanwhile a newer order that only wants the throw gets backordered, and your store shows it as out of stock or on preorder while a unit is sitting in the warehouse. Ship with preorder fixes that. When an incoming purchase order for the in-stock item will arrive in time for the preorder item, SKU.io reserves the in-stock item from that purchase order instead of the shelf. The order still ships at about the same time, and the shelf unit goes to the next order waiting for it or stays free to sell.

Paying a supplier used to mean two systems. You approved the bill in SKU.io, opened your bank, retyped the payee, the amount and the invoice numbers, then came back to SKU.io to record the payment by hand. Wires you sent straight from the bank, like a deposit to start production, never reached the purchase order at all. Mercury bill pay connects your Mercury business account to SKU.io. Pay a purchase invoice, a freight or duty bill, or a vendor deposit with a few clicks. Every payment is approved before any money moves, and SKU.io records it on the bill the day it leaves the bank.

A demand plan tells you what you need. It doesn't tell you what you can pay for. When stock ties up most of your cash, the real question is "what should I buy with the money I actually have this week, and what can wait?" Until now you answered it in a spreadsheet, supplier by supplier, guessing which bills land when. Buy within your cash answers it inside Demand Planning. Tell SKU.io your cash, your credit line and the balance you never plan below. It works out what you can spend each week after the bills you already owe. Then it ranks every reorder line from every supplier and shows where the money runs out.

Seasonal buyers plan months ahead and manage month by month, and the budget usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody else can see. It goes stale the moment a purchase order lands. Open-to-buy planning brings that budget into SKU.io. Create a season, plan what each category or brand should sell, mark down and hold at month end, and SKU.io works out how much you still need to buy. Purchase orders count against the budget as they're placed. Once the season starts, plan sits beside actual so you can see a category drifting before it's over budget.

If you sell apparel, you don't buy a style: you buy a size run. Order every size evenly and you sell out of the middle sizes while the ends sit on the shelf. A style's stock is spread across dozens of variants, so spotting the gaps means scrolling a long list. Sizes and colours puts the size run front and centre. Derive a size curve from how a style really sold. See its stock as a grid of sizes and colours and reorder the gaps in one go. Compare sizes across every vendor in one report.

Orders often start outside SKU.io: an order sheet filled in at a trade show, a PDF confirmation from a supplier, a market app's export. Retyping every line, size by size, is slow, and one wrong code means the wrong stock arrives. Create a PO from a supplier document skips the retyping. Upload the file, or snap a photo of the paper sheet. SKU.io reads the supplier, order number, dates and lines, matches each line to your products, and builds a draft purchase order for you to check before anything is created.

A torn seam at the register, a crushed box on the shelf: damaged items are small, constant and easy to lose track of. Creating an RMA for every one is too much work, so they get binned, the stock count drifts, and the money the supplier owes you is never claimed. Damage capture records a damaged item in one step. It moves the unit to a blemished SKU so it stops counting as sellable stock and records the loss in your books. If the supplier should pay for it, it raises a draft credit claim with them in the same step.

Every shipment you import into the United States gets a customs entry, and it already lists everything your duty setup needs. For each line it gives the HTS code, the value, the base rate, every Section 301, IEEPA or Section 122 duty stacked on top, and the duty actually charged. Until now that data sat in a PDF from your broker. You typed rates and product codes in by hand, and the broker's duty bill was split across products by cost. Customs entries reads the entry for you. Import a broker's 7501 or your ACE ES-003 report, and SKU.io matches each line to your purchase order. It proposes the duty rates and product codes the entry proves, and lets you split the duty bill by what each product was actually charged.

The emails SKU.io sends for you, such as order confirmations, shipping updates and purchase orders, are often the first thing a customer or supplier sees from your business. Until now, changing one meant hand-editing HTML in a small text box and hoping it looked right in an inbox. Email templates has been rebuilt around an AI assistant: describe the change in plain English, watch a live preview update with a real order, and save when you're happy. The assistant edits the words and the design together, and one change can be applied to every email that needs it.