Overview Dashboard

The inventory home screen gives you a high-level read on your whole operation in one view: KPI cards for products, variants, total on-hand, inventory value, and low-stock alerts, plus forecast-driven reorder suggestions, expiring-lot warnings, recent purchase orders, and a transfer status summary. Every card and tile is a shortcut — click to drill straight into the tab where those numbers live.

Key capabilities

• KPI cards: Products, Variants / SKUs, Total On Hand, Inventory Value, and Low Stock Alerts
• Inventory value computed as variant unit cost × on-hand across loaded products
• Low-stock count aggregated from per-location reorder signals
• Suggested Reorders card grouped by vendor, with estimated cost, lead time, days of cover, and safety stock
• One-click "Create draft POs" from vendor-grouped reorder suggestions
• "Plan against cash" planner to weigh reorder spend before drafting POs
• Forecast-driven badge when suggestions are backed by statistical demand forecasting
• Expiring Lots card (next 30 days, including already-expired), surfaced via FEFO lot tracking
• Recent Purchase Orders feed with vendor, total, and status badge
• Transfer Summary tiles by status (Draft, Pending, In Transit, Received, Cancelled)
• Quick actions to create a Product, Purchase Order, or Transfer, or jump to Production and Cycle Counts
• Resilient partial loading: a single failed widget shows an inline banner instead of blanking the page

How it works

The dashboard fans out reads — products, locations, orders, transfers, reorder suggestions, expiring lots — then aggregates per-location summaries into the KPIs and cards, degrading gracefully if any one call fails.

flowchart TD
  open["Open /inventory (Overview)"] --> fetch["Fetch products, locations, orders, transfers"]
  fetch --> summaries["Per-location summaries (on-hand, reorder count)"]
  summaries --> kpis["KPI cards + low-stock alerts"]
  fetch --> reorder["Reorder suggestions + expiring lots"]
  fetch --> feeds["Recent POs + transfer summary"]
  kpis --> drill["Click a card to drill into its tab"]

How to use it

1. Open Inventory from the sidebar — the Overview tab is the default view (/inventory).
2. Review the KPI cards: products, variants/SKUs, total on-hand, inventory value, and low-stock alerts.
3. Open Suggested Reorders to see vendor-grouped items below reorder point; click Create draft POs or Plan against cash.
4. Check Expiring lots (30 days) for perishables nearing or past expiry, and browse into Products from there.
5. Scan Recent Purchase Orders and the Transfer Summary tiles; click any to open the Orders or Transfers tab.
6. Use the quick-action buttons — New Product, New Purchase Order, New Transfer, Production, Cycle Counts — to start work, and Refresh to re-pull.

Pro tips

• KPI cards, transfer tiles, and recent-PO rows are all clickable — use them as a fast launcher into Products, Orders, and Transfers.
• The reorder suggester can only draft a PO for items that have a default vendor; items without one are listed separately so you can assign vendors on the Products tab.
• When suggestions carry a forecast-driven badge, the reorder points come from statistical demand forecasting (recomputed nightly) rather than a simple velocity heuristic.
• Watch the days-of-cover on each vendor group — anything at or below ~7 days is flagged urgent so you reorder before stocking out.
• An amber banner ("Some data could not load…") means a widget or a few location summaries failed; totals may be understated until you Retry.

In-depth guide

KPI cards & how they're computed

The Overview loads the first page of products (up to 100) for its metrics, so very large catalogs may show approximate totals until you filter or page elsewhere; a dedicated aggregate endpoint is a tracked follow-up.

Suggested reorders

• Grouped by vendor: below-reorder-point items show estimated total, lead time, days of cover, and total safety stock.
• Create draft POs: drafts one PO per vendor group (which you can edit or void before submitting).
• Plan against cash: opens a planner to sequence that spend against available cash.
• No default vendor: items below reorder point without one appear as an "unassigned" note rather than a draftable group.

Expiring lots

• What it lists: cost lots expiring within 30 days (and any already expired), sourced from FEFO lot tracking on products that track expiration.
• Each row shows: the variant/SKU, product, lot number, remaining quantity, and a days-to-expiry badge (red for expired, amber within ~7 days).

Recent POs & transfer summary

• Recent Purchase Orders: the latest orders with PO number, name, vendor, total, and a status badge.
• Transfer Summary: counts by status (Draft, Pending, In Transit, Received, Cancelled) from the transfer summary endpoint.
• Both link into their full tabs.

Resilience & empty states

• Graceful degradation: each widget fetch is wrapped so a single failure (a top-level call or a per-location summary) collects into one inline warning banner with a Retry button, rather than firing a toast per failure or blanking the page.
• First run: a brand-new business with no products and no orders gets a "Welcome to Inventory Management" prompt with an Add Product call to action.

Edge cases

• Variants without a unit cost contribute zero to inventory value.
• Per-location summary failures are counted and noted ("totals may be understated") instead of silently dropping stock.
• Counts reflect the first catalog page, so numbers can reconcile after filtering or paginating in other tabs.

Start free and see your whole inventory at a glance.