⏳ How To: Deal with Best-Before Dates
If you sell perishable goods or products with strict best-before dates (BBD), managing your inventory requires an extra layer of caution. Holding too much stock can lead to massive financial losses if the items expire before they can be sold to your customers.
To prevent this, we highly recommend tackling the issue at the source: your supplier settings. Here is how to configure Optiply to protect your perishable inventory.
⚙️ 1. The Golden Rule: Shorten Your Purchasing Cycle
The most effective way to prevent overstocking perishable items is to arrange hard limits directly in your Supplier Settings. You need to ensure that your purchasing cycle is always significantly shorter than the product's shelf life.
The Cycle Formula: Order Period + Delivery Time = Purchasing Cycle
Your total purchasing cycle should never exceed the best-before date period.
Example: If you sell a product that has a best-before shelf life of one year (365 days), you must make sure that the supplier's Delivery Time plus your Manual Order Period combined is well under 365 days.
By keeping this cycle short in your settings, the algorithm is forced to buy smaller, more frequent batches, ensuring the system never advises you to carry an unsafe amount of stock!
📊 2. Monitor Your "Stock Time"
For highly sensitive products, you should routinely verify how many days of stock you are actually holding to ensure it aligns with expiration windows.
On the Products page, you can view the Stock Time metric (which calculates exactly how many days your current physical inventory is projected to last based on demand). By comparing this Stock Time directly against your known best-before date, you can instantly see whether you are carrying too much stock. For instance, if your Stock Time is projected at 120 days, but the product expires in 60 days, you know immediately that you need to run a promotion to clear the excess!
⚠️ 3. Warning: Watch Out for MOQs and Lot Sizes
Even if your purchasing cycle is perfectly optimised, strict supplier constraints can accidentally force you into an overstock situation.
💡 Crucial Tip: Keep a very close eye on the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) and the Order In Lots (Order By/Multiples) settings at the product level.
If a supplier forces you to buy in pallets of 1,000 units, but your demand is only 100 units per month, and the product expires in 6 months, those constraints will quickly create expired dead stock. If a supplier's MOQ severely exceeds your demand timeframe for a perishable item, you may need to renegotiate your purchasing terms with them.
❓ 4. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Does Optiply track the exact expiration date of specific warehouse batches?
Optiply is a purchasing and forecasting tool, so it focuses on calculating your optimal purchasing cycle and "days of stock" based on demand. Tracking the physical expiration dates of specific barcodes or warehouse batches is typically handled by your WMS (Warehouse Management System).
What should I do if my supplier's MOQ guarantees my products will expire?
If the math simply doesn't work out—meaning the required minimum order will definitely take longer to sell than the product's shelf life—you cannot rely purely on automation. You will need to evaluate if the cost of the spoiled goods is worth the supplier relationship, manually adjust your purchase advice, or find a more flexible vendor for that specific item.