Understanding stock levels (quantity in stock & available numbers) for products

Breww gives you visibility over how many of a product you have in stock, how many are on orders which haven’t been delivered yet and the resulting quantity available.

In the case of multi-packs and mixed-pack products, there’s also a “Theoretical max available” quantity. Typically, this is the one to use on these items, but understanding how it’s calculated can be useful.

To explain this, let’s work through an example. In this example, let’s assume this relates to a multi-pack product of 12 cans of the same beer:

If you have multiple sites, you may also see a row per site here. The below advice still applies, but it’s on a per-site basis.

In stock

This is how many are in stock. For single-can products, this is the number of cans, as you’d expect. For the mixed packs, this is the number of mixed packs that have been prepared (assembled). This is 257 because, in this example, you would have told Breww that you have “assembled” the required 12 cans into a multi-pack. You can do this manually, but many people use Breww’s auto-assemble feature to leave the component cans/bottles on their own individual products until you’re ready to deliver an order. If you had all your cans as “singles”, then this number may well show as 0, but don’t worry, this is OK.

Ordered

As you’d expect, there are 5 packs of 12 cans assigned to orders which haven’t been completed yet (a total of 60 cans).

Available

Simply “In stock” minus “Ordered” (hence the 252). This is 252 packs of 12 (i.e. 3,024 cans).

Theoretical max (available)

This is the maximum that you could possibly produce by assembling the components into their mixed-pack or multi-pack form, minus the quantity assigned.

Some of our customers like to have auto-assembly enabled, but also occasionally will prepare a number of mixed-pack or multi-pack products in one go to save this being done at the point of delivery.

In this example, this means that we have 252 multi-packs currently assembled, but could have an additional 48 if cans that are available in other formats were assembled into this 12 pack. There could be another 576 cans currently in Breww as singles, or possibly other pack sizes, such as a 24 pack, or even mixed-packs like a “Taster box” product.

Breww’s auto-assembly feature can be configured to allow disassembling a 24 pack into singles or to not do this and only ever construct from cans currently stored as singles. You can configure this to work how you need it in your settings.

Breww can assemble your mixed-packs for you, but will never disassemble mixed-pack products automatically.

Why do I sometimes see three different figures for my Theoretical max?

If you have multiple sites set up in Breww, then this can lead to there being three different possible available stock figures, depending on how you choose to calculate the available stock.

Breww tries to keep this simple and easy to use, whilst still giving you all the information that you’re likely to need. If you see one figure here, this figure is the same for all three available stock calculations, if you see three, then you can hover over each figure to see which method it is. These methods are listed below and the three figures will always be shown in the same order, so if you know you like to use the third figure (for example), you can just remember to always use the third figure as this will always be the same calculation.

The three calculations are as follows:

Theoretical max available if stock is moved between sites

If you have a mixed-pack requiring some bottles of Beer A and some bottles of Beer B, and you have plenty of both beers, but Beer A is a Site 1 and Beer B is at Site 2, then according to this calculation method, you could produce this mixed-pack. The same logic applies to other products that required assembly.

Theoretical max available if stock is fixed to its current sites

This differs from the previous method in that a product requiring assembly (such as a mixed-pack) can only be considered as available if all the components are at the same site.

Theoretical max available from sites that can fulfill orders

This is like the previous calculation, except only sites enabled for order fulfillment are counted.

We highly recommend creating smallpack single products (even if you don’t sell them :eyes:)

Breww is capable of showing how much of a product you could sell or even automatically assembling and disassembling products to order by looking at other products that use this stock and reformatting them. For example, you may need to sell a 12-pack of cans but have none assembled; however, you have one 18-pack in stock. So long as that 18-pack is available, then Breww knows you can make up a 12-pack using it. For Breww to actually use this stock, you must also have a small pack single product setup, and this is why:

If you have 1 x 18-pack in stock and you need to sell 1 x 12-pack, Breww would check if it could do the following:

  1. Dissasemble 1 x 18-pack into 18 single-can products;
  2. Assemble 1 x 12-pack from those 18 single-can products, leaving 6 single-can products.

Breww will show a theoretical max stock figure inclusive of stock in other multi-packs but will be unable to physically disassemble and assemble stock between multi-packs unless they can be disassembled into single-can products first, so this is crucial for any assembly or disassembly process of multipacks.


Hiding sites from this section

If you have sites set up in Breww, that you need to keep, but don’t need to show in this section, you can edit the site and untick the “Show in stock breakdown on products” box.