Monthly inventory review checklist for distributors

A monthly inventory review works when it follows the same checklist every month, not when someone rebuilds a deck from scratch the night before. This inventory review checklist is built for distributors and wholesalers with hundreds to thousands of SKUs, uses data you already export from the ERP, and fits in 90 minutes if the list arrives ranked.

Before you start: what to bring

The review is only as good as its inputs. The KPI table below is the minimum. Each metric comes from a named source so nobody debates provenance in the room.

Block 1: Service and risk (20 minutes)

• Stockouts and near-misses on A-class SKUs versus the prior month. Which were forecastable? Which were supplier slips?
• The top 20 lines on the 14-day stockout list at month end: acted on, or overridden? If overridden, was the override right?
• Movement between risk tiers: how many products went from medium to high, and what do they have in common (supplier, category, season)?
• Override log review: recurring overrides point at wrong lead times, stale pack sizes or master data errors. Assign the fix.

What good looks like

Stockouts on A lines fall, and the ones that remain are traceable to a supplier slip or a demand spike nobody could have seen. If the same SKU appears three months running, the problem is structural: fix the reorder rule, not the order.

Block 2: Cash and clearance (20 minutes)

• Dormant stock value versus last month, and the count of products newly flagged for dead-stock onset (still selling, but on course to go silent).
• Excess cash above cover target, top 15 SKUs by euros. Which are stop-buy already? Which have open purchase orders that should be deferred?
• Clear-down progress: units and euros released this month against the approved budget.
• Carrying cost of the remaining excess, so finance hears the annual number rather than a unit count.

This is the block finance attends. Decisions here are about budget and order of operations: stop-buy first, transfers before discounts, liquidation only where recovery beats holding cost.

Block 3: Purchasing execution (20 minutes)

• Reorder list completion rate for the month. Below 70 percent means the weekly list is too long or receiving is the bottleneck.
• Supplier lead-time slips that changed risk scores. Compare promised lead time with median receipt history for the five largest suppliers; update the system value where they diverge.
• Stop-buy compliance: any purchase orders raised on frozen lines? Why?
• Minimum order quantities and case packs that repeatedly force overbuying; candidates for renegotiation.

Block 4: Commercial alignment (20 minutes)

• Accounts whose basket mix is shifting toward low-margin or high-risk SKUs. Sales explains; purchasing adjusts.
• Clients moving into the at-risk or lost RFM segments. The stock held for them is exposed; the account owner needs a plan.
• Promotions scheduled for next month versus stock cover on the promoted lines and their common co-purchases.
• Margin squeeze flags on high-volume lines: discount tiers, rebates and returns eroding what list price promised.

Block 5: Decisions to log (10 minutes)

Record three leadership decisions, each with an owner and a date:

1. Clearance budget for next month and the lines it applies to
2. Service-level exceptions: which contracted accounts get ring-fenced stock during the tight weeks
3. Supplier actions: exits, second sourcing, lead-time renegotiation

Next month's review opens by checking these three. Save the KPI table, the exports and the action list with the notes. Over a year that archive becomes the trend line that tells you whether the operation is actually improving.

How Flowra handles this

Most of the checklist's inputs are what Flowra computes on every nightly run: the risk tier for every product with its weighted components, stockout and overstock signals, dormant stock value, predicted dead-stock onset, forward cover on open orders, and client RFM segments with churn and spend-collapse signals. The Monday digest gives the weekly view; the monthly review reads the same figures over four digests and looks for the pattern.

Everything Flowra proposes is a draft with the fact, the forecast, the hypotheses and a confidence badge attached, and it stays a draft until someone approves it. That makes the review's action list and its override history the same document. During the meeting, anyone can ask the assistant in Slack, Teams or email why a line is flagged and get an answer built only from your data, with its freshness stated. When history is too short or the data is stale, Flowra says so rather than presenting a guess as a certainty. Data can come from a CSV export or a read-only connection to Odoo, SQL or WooCommerce; the integrations page lists what each source supports, and the security section covers how tenant data is isolated.