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Critical Inventory is the watchlist for SKUs you can't afford to run out of: dog food, baby formula, whatever your “the customer drives across town for this” items are. Open it and you see one big matrix: SKUs down, every store across, and the warehouse on the right. Colors make patterns jump out so you can spot when a whole brand is wiped because the warehouse is out.
Every cell is colored by raw units on hand:
Uniform thresholds make scanning hundreds of cells fast: if a row is mostly red and the warehouse column is also red, that's a purchasing problem, not a store problem. If the warehouse is green and a store is red, that's a transfer or replenishment problem.
Use the Store dropdown above the table to hide all other store columns. The warehouse stays visible; it's always relevant. Useful when you're working with one store manager and don't want the other columns in the way.
Tick the rows you want and hit Order N items in the bar at the bottom. That opens the order sheet as an Extra order, filtered to exactly those SKUs, with quantities already pre-filled from the forecast. Adjust the numbers and submit, and it becomes a normal transfer from the warehouse: the warehouse picks it and it lands on the store's Incoming list.
The bar asks one question, which store the order is going to. If you are assigned to a store, that is filled in already and you can just hit the button. Otherwise pick the store from the dropdown, or narrow the Store filter first, which answers the same question. Everything you tick goes to one store; to order for two stores, do it in two passes.
This works the same on the per-store days-of-cover page, where the store is obviously already known. On a phone or handheld, tap anywhere on a card to tick it.
Two things worth knowing. If some of what you tick has no warehouse stock, the bar tells you before you continue: you can still order it, and the warehouse sees the demand, but nothing will arrive until the warehouse is restocked. And if an item is closed at the destination store, it can't be ordered at all. It won't appear on the order sheet, and a red not shown marker tells you how many were left out so nothing goes missing quietly.
Click a store's name in the column header to open its full per-store view. That page uses smarter coloring (days of cover instead of raw units) and adds a sales-rate column. It also lets you tune that store's red and amber thresholds in days. Most people stick with the matrix; the drill-down is for when you want precision on a specific store.
Click Manage list at the top. The manage screen is a matrix too: SKUs down, stores across. Tick a cell to add that SKU at that store. Each store has its own watchlist: Akureyri might watch wild bird food that Smáralind doesn't carry.
For SKUs that matter everywhere, use the All stores column at the right of the row to tick every store in one click. To roll out a batch of new critical items, tick the row checkboxes on the left, then hit Add to all stores in the toolbar.
Manual on purpose. We don't auto-pick from ABC tier, because the SKUs you can't run out of aren't always your top revenue items: niche specialty foods, prescription diets, and seasonal staples all qualify.
A product appears in the matrix if it's critical at any store. The on-hand cell for stores that didn't flag it still shows, useful for spotting “Smáralind is out but Akureyri has plenty” situations where a transfer is the answer.