Inventory Forecasting and Reorder Points: Which Tools Do It

Running out of a best-seller and sitting on slow stock are the same mistake: buying at the wrong time. Two tools fix it at different levels. A reorder point tells you when to buy a product you already understand; forecasting estimates how much you will sell next, which matters when demand moves with seasons or channels. The first is arithmetic any system can hold; the second is what vendors charge for. We read the three vendors' pricing pages on October 28, 2026. Nothing here comes from a hands-on trial.

For whom: a business with a few hundred to several thousand stock items, buying from suppliers with lead times of days to weeks. Not for: a maker who buys raw materials against production orders; that is material requirements planning, a different job.

The arithmetic first

Reorder point = average daily sales x supplier lead time in days + safety stock.

A product that sells 12 units a day, from a supplier who delivers in 10 days, with 3 days of safety stock (36 units), has a reorder point of 12 x 10 + 36 = 156 units. When stock falls to 156, order. If daily sales or lead time change, so does the number, which is why a spreadsheet goes stale and software that recalculates from recent sales helps.

What each vendor includes

Our pick

Finale Inventory. It is the only one of the three whose entry plan already recalculates replenishment from sales velocity and drafts the purchase orders, so the feature is in the price rather than in a later add-on conversation. For a multichannel seller whose sales move week to week, that is the job.

• Choose Fishbowl Essentials if your demand is steady and you mainly need the system to hold a reorder point per item and tell you when to buy, at $229 a month; move to Scale when you want forecasting included.
• Choose Cin7 if you already need its other features; ask for the ForesightAI add-on price in your quote, since it is not part of any Core tier.

Before you trust any forecast

1. Clean the history. Stock-outs look like low demand; a forecast trained on them will under-order.
2. Set lead times per supplier, not one number for all.
3. Review the first three purchase cycles by hand before letting the system send orders.

For keeping on-hand counts accurate enough to forecast from, see cycle counting; for when a dedicated tool is worth it at all, see is your accounting or POS inventory enough.