Ordering blanks without over-buying

Walk into most decorating shops and there is a shelf, or a corner, or an entire back room, holding blanks that were ordered for a job and never used. Extra smalls from a school order in 2023. Six navy hoodies from a job that got cancelled. A case of a colour a supplier has since discontinued.

That shelf is cash. It was paid for out of a job's margin and it is not coming back.

Where the over-ordering comes from

Almost never from carelessness. It comes from four reasonable decisions:

• Padding for spoilage. Sensible on a 500-piece print run. Less sensible applied as a flat percentage to every job regardless of size or difficulty.
• Hitting a price break. Ordering 144 to get the better rate when the job needs 120 — worth it only if you will genuinely sell the other 24.
• Case-pack rounding. The garment comes six to a case and you need four.
• Guessing at size runs before the customer confirms. This is the big one, and it is the most avoidable.

Get the size run in writing before you order

For anything team- or school-related, ordering before you have the actual roster is a bet you will usually lose. You will be short on medium and long on XXL, every time.

The pattern that works is to make the size breakdown part of the order, not an email attachment. It means the customer commits to a number, and it means the person raising the purchase order is reading the same figures the customer supplied — not a total someone recalculated by hand.

When a customer genuinely cannot confirm sizes in time, price the risk in rather than absorbing it. A small overage charge is easier to explain up front than dead stock is to explain to yourself later.

Order against the job, not the shelf

A purchase order raised against a specific order can be checked against that order. One raised from a shopping list cannot.

This matters most at receiving. When goods arrive, someone has to confirm that what turned up matches what was ordered — and if it does not, that is the moment to know. A short shipment discovered at receiving is a phone call to the supplier. The same shortage discovered by the press operator on the morning of the run is a missed ship date.

Received short is normal, so plan for it

Every shop that orders volume gets shorted occasionally. Backorders happen, warehouses substitute, cases arrive with five instead of six.

Two habits keep it from becoming a crisis:

• Count at receiving, against the PO. Not "the boxes came" — the actual quantities, per size and colour.
• Make a shortage visible on the job immediately. The person scheduling the press needs to know today, not on run day.

Buying for stock is a different decision

Holding a base inventory of your top few garments in common sizes is often genuinely worthwhile — it lets you take rush work and absorb small shortages. That is a deliberate inventory decision with a number attached.

It is not the same thing as accumulating leftovers, and the distinction matters: one is stock you chose to hold and will sell, the other is stock that happened to you. Shops that conflate the two end up with a large back room and no idea what is in it.

What to measure

If you want one number, make it this: what percentage of what you order actually ships on the job it was ordered for? Most shops have never calculated it and are surprised by the answer. It is the difference between your quoted material cost and your real one.

How this works in PromoSoft

Purchase orders are raised against the order they serve, so what was ordered, from whom, and what arrived are recorded against the job rather than in a separate purchasing silo. Receiving is recorded per line, so a short shipment shows up on the order while there is still time to react.

Related: creating purchase orders · purchasing and receiving · managing blank suppliers.