Running a retail shop means knowing three things every single morning: what you sold yesterday, what you still have on the shelf, and what you need to reorder before a stockout eats a weekend's worth of profit.
Most small retailers I talk to do this with a notebook, a POS export, and a lot of guessing. Here is the 15-minute template that replaces the guessing.
The 3-Column Morning Check (5 minutes)
Open yesterday's sales export and your stock list side by side. For every SKU with less than 1 week of cover (weekly sales vs. on-hand), it goes on the reorder list. That single rule — "cover < 1 week = reorder" — catches 90% of stockouts before they happen.
The Reorder Sheet (5 minutes)
| Column | Formula |
|---|---|
| Days of cover | On-hand units ÷ avg daily sales |
| Reorder point | Avg daily sales × lead time + safety stock |
| Order qty | Reorder point − on-hand |
If you only ever build one spreadsheet for your store, build this one. It pays for itself the first time it prevents a stockout on a Saturday.
The Weekly Loss Review (5 minutes)
Once a week, list every SKU that went from "fine" to "reorder" in under 3 days. Those are your demand spikes — the reason last-minute scramble orders cost you shipping fees. Track them, and you start seeing the pattern before the spike, not after.
Why 15 minutes works
- It is short enough to actually happen daily (the death of most inventory systems is that they take 45+ minutes)
- It runs on data you already have (POS export + a stock count)
- It produces ONE output: a reorder list. No dashboards, no rabbit holes.
The toolkit
If you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself, we packaged this exact system — the morning check, the reorder sheet with the formulas pre-filled, and the weekly loss review — into an Ops Starter Kit:
🔗 https://hive80lab.gumroad.com
Fifteen minutes a day, one clear reorder list, and no more Saturday stockouts. That is the whole system.
Share it with a store owner who is still using the notebook 📋
