Reorder rules without a supplier: what the report can and cannot do

Most products in a store have an obvious source: a vendor you email, a lead time you have learned the hard way, a minimum they insist on. Some do not. The candles you make yourself. The line you buy from whichever wholesaler has stock this month. The dropshipped range where the supplier is a website and a credit card. The product you are still deciding whether to keep. For all of these, the question of whether it is time to reorder is real, but the answer is not a purchase order to a named vendor.

Restock Ops allows for this. A reorder rule has a supplier field, and it is optional. You can set a reorder point or a days-of-cover target for a product without saying who you buy it from, and the product appears in the reorder report like any other. What changes is what the report can calculate for it, and what you can do with the row once it is there. This post lays that out, so that a rule without a supplier is a decision rather than an oversight.

What a supplier contributes to the report

The reorder report works per product variant. It takes the current available quantity from Shopify, a sales velocity from recent orders, and the rule you set, and it decides whether the variant is at or below its reorder point and how many units to suggest. Three of the inputs to that calculation live on the supplier record or on the link between the supplier and the item, not on the rule.

Lead time becomes zero, and that matters

The biggest effect is on timing. A days-of-cover rule asks how many days of sales you want in stock, and the report compares that with how many days the current stock will last at the measured velocity. The lead time is part of the maths: if the supplier takes 14 days to deliver, the report needs to flag the product 14 days earlier than it otherwise would, so that the order arrives before stock runs out. The reorder point versus days-of-cover post goes through the two rule types.

With no supplier, the lead time is zero. The report assumes you can restock the moment you notice, which is true for a product you make in-house or pick up from a cash-and-carry, and badly wrong for anything that ships. If the real lead time is two weeks, the row will go amber two weeks later than it should and you will be out of stock before the suggestion looks urgent.

The fix, when a supplier genuinely does not exist, is to build the lead time into the rule itself. For a days-of-cover rule, add the realistic lead time to the cover you want: 21 days of cover plus 14 days of lead time becomes a 35 day target. For a reorder point rule, set the point at roughly the units you sell during the lead time plus a buffer. Either way, the rule carries the lead time that the supplier record would normally carry. Write why in the rule's notes so that the number does not look arbitrary in six months.

No minimum, no case size, no rounding

The second effect is on the suggested quantity. When a supplier item exists for the product, the report rounds the suggestion up to the minimum order quantity and then to a whole number of cases, because that is what the vendor will accept. The lead times and MOQ post explains the rounding. Without a supplier there is no supplier item, so the suggestion is the raw number: enough units to bring stock back to the target, and not one more.

For home-made or dropshipped goods that is exactly right. For a product that you do buy in cases but have not bothered to set a supplier for, it is an invitation to order 37 of something that comes in boxes of 12. If you catch yourself rounding in your head, the supplier is worth setting up.

The row cannot become a purchase order

The third effect is the one that stops people. The reorder report has a Create draft POs action: tick the rows you want, press the button, and Restock Ops groups the ticked rows by supplier and creates one draft purchase order per supplier, with the suggested quantities as lines. A purchase order needs a supplier; it is addressed to someone. So rows without one are left out. The app creates the drafts it can, and reports the rows it skipped and why, so nothing silently disappears.

This is deliberate rather than a gap. A purchase order in Restock Ops is a record that will later be received against, with Shopify inventory adjusted by the received quantities and the unit cost flowing into cost history. For a product you make yourself, that is the wrong record. There is no delivery to receive and no invoice to match; stock arrives when you finish making it, and you adjust inventory in Shopify directly. The reorder report's job for that product ends at telling you it is time to make more.

If you do want a paper trail for an unnamed source, the answer is to name it. A supplier called Workshop or Various wholesalers is a perfectly good supplier record. It gives the report a lead time to use and gives you a PO to receive against, and if the real vendor changes from month to month, the supplier notes can say so.

When a rule should have no supplier

In every case, remember the lead time rule above: if the product takes time to arrive, that time has to be in the rule, because nowhere else holds it.

• Products you make or assemble yourself, where the trigger to act is a production run rather than an order.
• Dropshipped products, where the supplier fulfils orders directly and your stock figure is a cap rather than a shelf. The report still tells you when the cap is near.
• Items bought ad hoc from whichever wholesaler has stock, with no lead time or minimum worth recording.
• Products on probation: you want to know when they would need reordering before deciding whether they get a supplier at all. The new product post covers the first weeks of a rule.

When a rule loses its supplier

A rule can also end up without a supplier by accident. If a supplier is deleted, the rules that pointed to it are kept but their supplier field is cleared rather than the rules being deleted with it. The products stay in the report, which is the safe outcome, but from that moment their lead time is zero and their suggestions are unrounded, and the Create draft POs action will skip them. If you delete a supplier you have stopped using, go through its former products and assign the new vendor before the next reorder run.

The report makes orphaned rules easy to find: the supplier column is empty. Sort or scan by that column after any supplier clean-up.

A short checklist

1. Open Reorder rules and look for rules with an empty supplier. Decide for each whether that is intended.
2. For intended ones, check the rule carries the real lead time: days of cover plus lead time, or a reorder point that covers the lead time's sales.
3. For the rest, create or pick the supplier and set it on the rule. Add a supplier item if there is a minimum or case size to respect.
4. Run the reorder report and, when creating drafts, read the skipped list. A product there with no supplier is either a make-it-yourself item or a rule you missed.

FAQ