From Forecast to Purchase Order: Inventory Replenishment for WordPress Stores
A forecast tells you what will happen. A replenishment plan tells you what to actually buy, how urgently, and from whom. Here is how KasbPro turns one into the other, and why it never places the order for you.
Knowing you are low on stock and knowing exactly what to order, how urgently, and from which supplier are two different problems. The first is forecasting. The second is replenishment — turning a forecast into a concrete, actionable buying plan. This is how KasbPro does it for a WooCommerce store, precisely.
From forecast to a plan
Every product flagged as needing attention (see how the forecast is calculated) gets turned into a line on a replenishment plan: a recommended quantity, an estimated cost at your recorded cost price, an urgency level, and — where known — a preferred supplier drawn from your purchase history.
The three urgency tiers, exactly
Urgency is not a vague label — it follows a specific rule:
- Critical — the product is already out of stock, or has three days of cover or less. This is the "you are about to lose sales this week" tier.
- High — flagged for reorder, but with more than three days of cover remaining. Still needs action, just not today.
- Medium — everything else that made it onto the plan (typically products classified "low," worth planning for this cycle rather than acting on immediately).
The plan is sorted critical first, then high, then medium, and within each tier by estimated cost — so the biggest, most urgent purchases are at the top, not buried alphabetically.
Grouped by supplier
Where a product's supplier is known — resolved from your most recent purchase of that item — the plan groups lines by supplier and totals the estimated cost per group. If you buy from three suppliers, you see three totals, which is directly useful for deciding who to call first or whether a single order crosses a supplier's free-shipping threshold.
Be aware of the honest limit here: the supplier shown is whoever you most recently bought that product from, not necessarily your best or cheapest option. If you buy the same item from different suppliers depending on price or availability, the plan will not know to suggest the better one — it reflects your purchase history, not a live price comparison.
Why it never creates the purchase automatically
This is deliberate, and worth explaining rather than just stating: turning a suggested reorder into an actual Purchase Bill creates a real liability on your books — money you now owe a supplier. That should never happen without a person deciding it should. The replenishment plan tells you what to buy; you still click to generate the bill, review the quantities and price, and confirm it. Nothing purchases itself, and nothing changes your payables without that click.
What happens after you order
When the bill is approved and stock arrives, recording the purchase adds the quantity back to KasbPro's inventory and posts the expense to your ledger. One limit worth repeating from elsewhere in this series: that stock increase happens inside KasbPro. It does not currently push back out to update the stock number shown on your live WooCommerce store — you would still update that side directly if your storefront needs to reflect it immediately.
What the plan assumes, honestly
The recommended quantity is built from a fixed 7-day lead time and 14-day review cycle assumption, applied the same way to every product regardless of which supplier it comes from — there is no per-supplier lead time setting today. If one supplier reliably takes three weeks and another next-day delivers, the plan does not currently know the difference. Treat the quantities as a sound starting point to check against what you actually know about each supplier, not a number tuned specifically to them.
Who this is genuinely useful for
If you manage more than a handful of SKUs and reordering currently means scanning a product list hoping to notice what is low, this replaces that scan with a sorted, costed list. If you have five products and know their stock levels by heart, the manual overhead of checking is small enough that this saves you little — it earns its keep as your catalog grows.
What is free
The full replenishment plan — urgency tiers, supplier grouping, and estimated costs — is on the free plan, with no limit on products or suppliers. Generating the resulting Purchase Bill is also free; there is no charge tied to acting on a recommendation.
Related reading: how the forecast is actually calculated and how KasbPro classifies every product.