Safety Stock on Analytic Orders
Every buyer has a few items they order more of than the numbers say they need. Not because the math is wrong, but because that particular manufacturer short-ships you twice a year, and running out of your best-selling robusto for three weeks costs far more than carrying an extra box.
Safety stock is TORO's way of writing that down, so you stop having to remember it.
Setting One
On the Analytic Purchase Order screen, right-click the item and choose Set Safety Stock for this Item...
You'll be asked for the number of extra singles to keep as a cushion. That's the part worth reading twice: it's measured in single cigars, not boxes. If you want an extra box of something and the box holds 20, the number you want is 20. The prompt tells you the box size for that item so you're not doing it from memory.
Enter 0 to remove a cushion you've set, or use Clear Safety Stock for this Item from the same right-click menu.
From then on, TORO orders more of that item. The safety stock raises the target it's aiming at, so it flows through into the Total Needed and Analytic Order columns like any other part of the calculation.
Two columns on the grid show you where things stand:
- Safety Stock — what you've set. Yours, and it's the one that spends money.
- TORO Suggests — TORO's opinion, described below. It's information only.
The TORO Suggests Column
TORO looks at how often an item has actually come up short and suggests a cushion.
The interesting part is what it does when it doesn't have much to go on, which is most of the time. Backorders are rare and lumpy — on a typical store there might be 169 backorder events spread across 123 items over seven years, and most of those items have exactly one. A rate worked out from a single event is noise, not signal.
So TORO blends: an item's own rate is pulled toward its brand's, the brand's toward the vendor's, and the vendor's toward your store average — each in proportion to how much real evidence there is behind it. An item with a genuine track record keeps most of its own history. An item with one event out of one order barely moves off its brand's rate.
A blank means "not enough history to judge." This one matters. On every other column in that grid, blank means zero — here it doesn't. Blank is TORO saying it doesn't know yet, which is a completely different thing from saying the manufacturer is reliable. Below three orders for an item, you'll get a blank rather than a guess.
Hover any row to see the reasoning in plain language, so you can check the figure instead of taking it on faith.
Why It Never Changes Your Order by Itself
The suggestion is shown to you and never spends a penny on its own. You have to set a safety stock yourself for anything to change.
That's deliberate, and the reason is worth knowing: a backorder only exists in TORO because somebody pressed Move to Backorder while receiving. If they pressed Delete (not coming) instead, nothing was recorded at all, and old rows can be removed outright.
So the counts TORO is working from are a floor — the real short-shipping rate is at least what it shows and possibly worse. That's a perfectly good basis for a suggestion to a buyer who knows their vendors. It is not a good basis for automatically enlarging orders.
Two Other Things on That Screen
Show Manufacturer Sku adds a column with the vendor's own SKU for each item — handy when you're working against a supplier's order form or invoice.
And quantities you type into Manually Added Order now survive ticking Show Ids, Show Manufacturer Sku or Load All Active. They used to be thrown away when the grid reloaded, which meant losing a morning's typing to one stray click.
If Saving Fails
If TORO can't save a safety stock it tells you plainly, leaves everything unchanged, and gives you the code ERR-SS-2141. Nothing is half-applied — read that as "it didn't save," not "it might have." Give us a call with that code.