Purchase orders: from manual headache to automated proposals

Having to reorder inventory is a good problem—it means you're selling. But the process itself is tedious. Figuring out what needs restocking, how much to order, and when to place the order so it arrives before you run out. Multiply that across dozens of products and several suppliers, and purchase orders become a serious time sink.

The real challenge isn't filling out the form. It's knowing what should be on it.

The guessing game

Most sellers reorder reactively. Stock gets low, panic sets in, and you rush an order to your supplier hoping it arrives before you sell out. Or worse—you don't notice in time and end up with stockouts, cancelled orders, and tanking marketplace rankings.

The alternative is spending hours each week reviewing stock levels, checking sales velocity, calculating lead times, and manually deciding what to reorder. That works, until you have hundreds of SKUs and not enough hours in the day.

Either way, you're guessing. And guessing leads to two expensive outcomes: ordering too much (cash tied up in slow-moving stock) or ordering too little (lost sales and angry customers).

What purchase orders actually solve

A purchase order is simply the document you send to a supplier specifying what you want to buy: which products, what quantities, at what price, delivered by when. It creates a paper trail and keeps both parties aligned.

But the document itself isn't the hard part. The decisions behind it are:

What to reorder? Which SKUs are running low, and which ones can wait?

How much? Enough to cover demand until the next order, but not so much you're overstocked.

When to order? Factor in supplier lead time so stock arrives before you run out.

From whom? If you have multiple suppliers for the same product, which one makes sense right now?

Getting these decisions right—consistently, across your whole catalog—is what separates smooth operations from constant firefighting.

From reactive to proactive

The shift happens when your system starts telling you what to order instead of you having to figure it out.

In Stockpilot, purchase orders aren't just documents you create manually. The system analyzes your sales history and demand patterns, then proposes orders before you run low. You see a suggestion: "Order 200 units of SKU X from Supplier Y, expected to arrive before current stock runs out." You approve, adjust, or decline.

This flips the whole process. Instead of reviewing every product hoping you don't miss something, you review proposals the system generates. Your job becomes approving decisions, not making them from scratch.

Scheduled purchasing that runs itself

Beyond one-off suggestions, Stockpilot can run on a schedule. Set it to review your inventory weekly, and it generates a batch of proposed purchase orders based on current stock levels, sales velocity, and supplier lead times.

Every Monday morning, you open Stockpilot to a list of recommended orders. Review them, approve the ones that make sense, adjust quantities where needed, and you're done. No spreadsheet analysis, no manual stock checks, no guessing.

For sellers managing hundreds of SKUs across multiple suppliers, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between spending hours on purchasing admin and spending minutes.

The result

Purchase orders stop being something you dread and become something that just happens. Stock stays healthy. Suppliers get clear orders. You stop running out of best-sellers and stop over-ordering slow movers.

More importantly, you get time back. Time you can spend on sourcing new products, negotiating better supplier terms, or actually growing your business instead of administering it.