Anatomy of an auto-drafted purchase order

Most owners we talk to don't actually mind writing purchase orders. What they mind is the half-day of triage that comes before the writing — pulling sales reports, checking what came in last Thursday, remembering which vendor changed their case pack, then second-guessing the whole thing.

SalesVu's Smart PO Automater takes the triage. It doesn't take the decision. Here's exactly what's in the draft when it lands in your tray.

Step 1 — Who is the PO for?

The agent generates one draft PO per vendor, per location that needs replenishment. If three of your locations need more of an item from the same vendor, you get three drafts (not one combined order with mystery splits), so each location's receiving team sees only what's coming to them.

Step 2 — What's eligible?

An item is eligible for inclusion when its current on-hand position breaches one of two replenishment signals you set under Manage Inventory:

• Threshold Quantity — the floor you never want to go below.
• Max Stock Days — the maximum days of inventory you want to hold, derived from recent sales velocity.

If neither is breached, the item is not on the draft. The agent isn't pre-buying for the sake of it.

Step 3 — How much?

For each eligible item, the agent calculates the order quantity using:

• Sales velocity over the trailing window, adjusted for seasonality where SalesVu has the history.
• Lead Time from this vendor for this item — the gap between PO submission and shelf-ready stock.
• Storage Capacity — the ceiling that prevents the draft from over-ordering into a backroom you don't have.
• Vendor case pack / UoM — units of measure are respected so a draft never asks for 7 units when the vendor ships in 6s.

The output is a quantity that lands you back above your Threshold and within your Max Stock Days target, without exceeding Storage Capacity.

Step 4 — At what cost?

The draft uses the most recent landed cost SalesVu has for each item from this vendor, so the PO subtotal is real money, not last quarter's number. If the vendor recently raised prices, the Profit Margin Analyst has already flagged that separately so it's not a surprise when you open the draft.

Step 5 — Anything custom?

Custom PO fields (department codes, GL tags, project IDs, route numbers) are carried through automatically based on the item and vendor profile. The draft is the same shape your finance team is already used to.

What the human still does

The PO opens as a Draft, not Open. Nothing has been sent. The owner or manager:

• Spot-checks the lines that surprise them.
• Adjusts a quantity if there's an event coming up the agent couldn't have known about.
• Removes an item the vendor told them by text last night was on backorder.
• Clicks Open / Submit.

Receiving happens in the same workflow you already use — full or partial receives, with the inventory automatically updated and the PO state moved to Closed when complete. The same Inventory module tracks variance between ordered, received and invoiced.

Why drafts (not auto-sends) matter

Inventory is one of the few places where being "100% automated" is the wrong target. Vendors text you. Snowstorms happen. A regular customer just told you they want a case of something. The owner has context the data doesn't have — yet. The Smart PO Automater is built to get you 95% of the way and ask for the last 5%, every time.

What this changes about Monday morning

Instead of opening a spreadsheet, you open a tray of drafts. The first one is the produce order. The second is the wine order. The third is the merch order for the gift shop. Each one is two minutes of review instead of an hour of assembly. The week starts with decisions, not data entry.

That's the deliverable. Not "AI inventory." Just: a Monday that starts at decision time.