Purchase Advice

With purchase advice, Picqer automatically calculates which products you need to purchase. Choose an advice method and receive a clear recommendation per supplier that you can directly turn into a purchase order.

Settings per product

Purchase advice works per supplier, so you need to specify for each product which supplier you purchase it from. You can do this on the product page, or configure it in bulk using an Excel import.

In addition, you can set the stock strategy per product, where you decide whether the product should only be purchased for backorders or should be kept in stock.

Do you use multiple warehouses in Picqer? The purchase advice works per warehouse, so you need to configure your stock strategy per product for each warehouse.

Purchase advice

Go to Purchasing > Tools > Purchase Advice to access the purchase advice overview. Picqer will already calculate a general recommendation here. The calculation in the overview is based on open backorders and desired stock levels, provided you have configured these settings for your products.

In the overview, you can see per supplier how many products you should purchase based on the settings you configured for each product. You will also see how many backorders you have for that supplier and when the last purchase order was placed with them.

Advice methods

After selecting the supplier you want to order from, you can choose an advice method.

• Advice for backorders: Picqer checks the open backorders and calculates how many units are needed to fulfill them. Configured stock levels are not taken into account in the advice.
• Also advice for desired stock levels: In addition to open backorders, the desired stock levels are also taken into account.
• Also advice for smart forecasting: In addition to open backorders and desired stock levels, Picqer also analyzes the sales history of each product over a selected period. Read more about how this forecast works further down this page.

The advice

Once you click “Give advice”, Picqer will calculate which products need to be purchased. Depending on the number of products, this may take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

After the calculation is complete, you will see the recommendation with all products that should be ordered, including the current available stock. Want to know how the recommendation was calculated? Click the "Details" button to view the quantities Picqer used for the advice.

Do you not want to order certain products? You can simply uncheck them. The most important products to purchase are displayed at the top, such as products required to fulfill backorders.

At the bottom, you can see the total number of products being ordered and the total purchase amount.

Create purchase order

Ready to order these products? Click "Create purchase order" and we will create a new purchase order containing the selected products. If there are open purchase orders for this supplier, Picqer will ask whether we should add the products to the open order or if you want to create a new purchase order.

Within the purchase order you can still adjust quantities, remove products, or add other products. Happy with the order? Save it and place the order with your supplier.

Smart forecasting

The advice method with smart forecasting analyzes how many units of each product were sold during a selected period. You can choose your own period: 4, 12, or 52 weeks.

Next, you choose how many days ahead you want to forecast, for example 28 days. This determines how far ahead Picqer should predict demand. For example, if you place orders with a supplier every 3 weeks, you may want to keep 3.5 or 4 weeks of stock available.

Picqer calculates how many units of each product were sold during the selected period and uses this data to predict how many units will be needed in the coming days. If this forecasted quantity is higher than what would normally be purchased based on your desired stock levels, Picqer will recommend ordering the higher quantity instead. If the forecasted sales are lower than your desired stock levels, Picqer will base the recommendation on your desired stock levels.

Smart forecasting only includes products that are configured to be kept in stock. Products that are only purchased for backorders are excluded from the forecast.

Do you have new products? For example: if a product has only been selling for 2 weeks while the advice period looks back 12 weeks, Picqer will use the average sales from those last 2 weeks instead of the full 12-week period. To determine this, we look at either the first time the product was sold or the first time stock was received for the product, whichever date came first.