Questions about POplanner

POplanner is a purchase planning web app for wholesalers, distributors and importers. It reads the stock and sales export from your ERP and suggests a purchase order per supplier: which items to order, how many, and by when. It counts lead times, safety stock, carton sizes, sea and air freight, seasonal events and past stock-outs.

Companies that buy goods from suppliers and sell them on to shops or businesses, and that plan purchases from an ERP plus a spreadsheet today. It suits a few hundred to a few thousand active items across several suppliers, with lead times of weeks or months.

It replaces the monthly purchase workbook. Instead of pasting exports and repairing formulas, you drop in the export and get an order quantity for every item, with one-off spikes, stock-out months and season dates handled. Bestsellers are reordered before they run out, and slow items are not topped up.

It reads the export as it is, recognises columns in English, German and Dutch, rounds to cartons, keeps one-off spikes and stock-out months out of the average, plans 13 seasons by sea and air, and gives every line a confidence score and a written-out sum. A spreadsheet can do any formula you write, but you maintain it. See the full comparison.

No. It sits next to your ERP and plans purchases from its export. Your ERP stays the source of truth for stock, orders and invoices, and POplanner never writes back to it.

An item is reordered when its stock, plus what is already on order, lasts less than your lead time plus a safety margin. The default is 2.0 plus 0.5 months, and you can set it per supplier.

It orders the gap between what you have and a cover target you choose, for example 5 months of sales, and rounds up to full cartons. Every line shows the sum.

If most of an item's sales came in one month, POplanner suggests a safe quantity without that month, marks the line yellow and asks you to check it. It warns you before export if flagged lines are still unchecked.

Months with zero sales because the item was out of stock are recognised and kept out of the average, so the empty shelf doesn't lower the next order.

Thirteen European events: Sinterklaas, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Carnival, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, King's Day, Pride, festival season, Oktoberfest, Halloween and Black Friday. For each it shows the order-by date by sea (12 weeks by default) and by air (4 weeks).

A score from 0 to 100 on each suggestion. It rises with months of data, steady sales and recent sales, and falls with gaps and spikes. Hover it to read the reasons.