Knowing what to reorder, before you're standing in an empty aisle.

Some products fly off the shelf and nobody notices until the shelf's empty. Others sit for months quietly taking up space and money. Reordering by memory or gut feeling means you're almost always either short or overstocked - rarely right.

This isn't theoretical for me. I've built order and stock tracking for a real wholesale platform before, at real scale, for suppliers and retailers who live or die by exactly this problem - see that case study for what it actually took.

Phase 1 - watching, quietly

1. It reads what's actually selling. Till or stock data where you've got something worth reading. Where you haven't - an older till with nothing useful to plug into - a camera already watching the till, matched against the stock list you give me, can build the same picture without needing the till itself to cooperate. Plenty of shops already have the camera; it just hasn't been asked to count anything yet.

2. It spots the pattern before the shelf's empty. A product trending toward zero gets flagged days ahead, not the morning you run out.

3. It flags what's not moving. Slow stock sitting in the stockroom, so you know what to discount or simply stop reordering.

Phase 2 - turning it into a decision

4. It drafts the reorder - or just messages you. Quantities based on what's actually sold recently, not a fixed habit or last year's guess. A drafted order sitting ready, or a text saying "you're low on X, want me to sort it" - I work to your workflow, not the other way round.

5. You approve it, or adjust it. A tap, not a spreadsheet session - but it's still your call on what actually gets ordered.

6. One clear answer on where an order stands. Placed, confirmed, or still waiting - so you're never guessing whether it actually went through.

Why it doesn't just reorder automatically

It would be easy to have this quietly reorder stock the moment levels dip. I don't build it that way. A wrong automatic order - wrong size, wrong season, wrong quantity - costs real money sitting in a stockroom. The agent's job is making sure you see the pattern in time to make the call yourself, not making it for you.

Worth saying plainly: this is shown as a simple version. The same pattern can be built simple or pushed a lot further - more products watched, more suppliers connected, more of the ordering prepared for you - depending on what your business actually needs.

Wondering if this needs a new till system or stock platform first? Usually not - here's how that actually works.

Worth flagging separately: the same camera that counts what's sold could, with a lot more work, also help spot theft. That's a genuinely bigger job with its own considerations, not something this example includes by default - if that's an actual problem for you, it's a separate conversation.

What the £199 buys, and what it doesn't

The Working Diagnosis buys the plan for your version of this - what you're already tracking, what's worth watching, and what a sensible reorder threshold looks like for your business. Not the build itself. The report is yours to keep either way. If we go further, the £199 is credited off the first invoice.