Find out you’re low on cable before the job, not on it.

How Stock Reorder Watcher actually works

Running out is rarely a surprise in hindsight. The last drum of 2.5mm went on Tuesday, the back boxes went the week before, and both facts were known by somebody — just not on Friday afternoon when the wholesaler was still open. The cost lands later: a morning driving instead of working, a customer rearranged, a job that needed one visit taking two.

This employee owns one narrow question and answers it on a schedule: against the levels you set, what is below them, and when was that counted. It does that in six steps, in this order.

1. Claim the checkTakes the stock you told it to watch and the review window, and claims that pair. If the same window already has a finished list, it stops there rather than writing a second one about the same fortnight.
2. Read only what you choseReads the exact stock location, spreadsheet area, upload or saved stock information you picked when you hired it — up to two places, and nothing beyond them — and keeps hold of when those records were last updated.
3. Check the item and where it livesConfirms the item code, the label, the location it belongs to, the quantity showing and the time that quantity came from. A read that failed is recorded as a read that failed. It is never treated as zero stock.
4. Compare against your own levelsApplies only the reorder levels, preferred quantities and pack rules you saved. Where a rule is missing or two rules conflict, it stops on that item instead of picking one.
5. Save one dated listOne table in Results: what is under its level, where it is, how much is left, what the level was, and when the count was taken. If nothing is low, that gets recorded too — a quiet week is an answer, not silence.
6. Check again next timeOn the next window it rechecks the same records and leaves the earlier lists untouched, so you can see what has been sitting on the list for three weeks running.

The dating matters more than it sounds. A reorder list with no time on it is a list you have to verify before you act on it, which is most of the work back again. This one carries the moment the count came from, on every row.

What lands on the list

• The dates it checked
• The stock location or spreadsheet area it read
• When those stock records were last updated
• How many items it checked
• The low-stock items, each with its location, quantity and reorder level
• Which reorder levels it used to decide
• Any item with no reorder level saved
• The outcome: list ready, nothing low, blocked, or already done for this window

You can open it, save it, copy it or export it — a list you can read down while you are on the phone to the wholesaler, or paste into an order. It tells you when a new low-stock item appears or something genuinely needs you, and stays quiet for a repeat run, a nothing-to-do run and a safe test.

What it will not do

• Buy or reserve stock — with a supplier, a wholesaler or anyone else
• Message a supplier: sending is not an action this employee has
• Change your stock records, or write a count back into them
• Invent a reorder level, a pack size or a demand forecast
• Treat a failed read, or a source it could not open, as an empty shelf
• Read a location, spreadsheet or file you did not pick
• Guess which item you meant when a code matches two of them
• Take a payment, book anything in, or update a customer record

You choose, per employee, how much it does on its own. On this one that setting has very little to reach: its list of allowed actions is empty, and ordering, supplier email, payment links and record changes are denied outright, so nothing you switch on turns them into possibilities. What the setting governs here is the checking itself — a routine read-only check can run to the schedule you gave it, and it stops and asks when the location, an item or a reorder level is unclear. Every employee lands paused, and you choose which records it can use.

What you set up

1. Which stock it watchesThe exact stock location, spreadsheet area, upload or saved stock information — up to two of them, chosen when you hire it. If more than one thing matches what you have said, it stops and asks you to pick rather than reading the wrong shelf and writing a confident list about it.
2. Your reorder levelsThe reorder levels, preferred quantities and pack rules live in the records you point it at, and they are the only rules it applies. There is nothing to teach it and no threshold of its own.
3. How often it runsDaily, weekly, or only when you press the button. Weekly is what it arrives set to, and it comes with a default allowance of eight runs a month — comfortable for weekly, worth knowing before you choose daily.

That is the whole setup: there is no questionnaire, no stock system to migrate to and no data to import — it works from the records you already keep. When an item has no reorder level saved, it does not choose for you and there is no setting that makes it guess: the item goes to Needs You with the level named as the missing piece, so you can add it once and have it counted from then on.

Who it’s for

Anyone whose day can be ruined by one missing box. An electrician on a rewire needs the cable, the back boxes and the glands on the van before eight, not at half nine from a wholesaler twenty minutes the wrong way. A plumber on a service round gets through 15mm elbows, service valves and flux without ever counting them. A mobile groomer, a locksmith, a tiler — same shape of problem. The stock is small, cheap and unglamorous, and being short of it costs a day’s work.

It also does exactly what its name says for shops and product businesses that check the same shelves every week and want one clear list without anything being bought automatically. That is the group its ready-made connected routes were built around, and it is honest to say so: stock lives in a shop system far more often than it lives in a van.

Which is why, for a trade, the route that fits is usually the one you already have. An area of a spreadsheet — the van stock tab someone updates on a Friday — a stock export you upload, or stock information saved in LoopSuite. Google Sheets is the spreadsheet route; Shopify, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and Notion are named in its contract as other places stock records can sit, and each of those pages carries the current position on that app.

The honest counter-case: it can only count what is written down. If the van stock lives in your head and in the back of the van, there is nothing here for it to read, and no employee can fix that — someone has to write the list once. If you would rather start where the money is, Overdue Invoice Follow-up and Quote Follow-up work from records you already have, and the full roster has the rest. Materials priced into the job itself belong to Quote Builder, which works from your own price list.

Questions people ask