What's the difference between a rule and a manual override?

Rules apply across many items and adjust as the data changes. A manual override pins a single item to a specific value or behaviour until a person changes it. Both are visible on the suggestion: "category default → supplier override → manual lock." You always see which one fired.

Who can change a rule, and what's logged?

Permissions follow your Business Central roles — typically the lead purchaser and the supply chain manager. Every rule change is timestamped with who changed it, the old value, the new value and the reason field they filled in.

Can I bulk-edit rules?

Yes. Apply a rule template to a class, a category, or a supplier in one action. Changes are previewed against current suggestions before they are committed.

Inventory & Purchasing

uPurchase

Demand forecasting and purchasing, in one screen.

uPurchase is the demand-forecasting and inventory-intelligence layer Business Central never had. It classifies every SKU, forecasts demand by location, sizes safety stock against a chosen service level, applies supplier calendars and lead times, weighs carrying cost against stockout risk — and then turns the whole picture into concrete, explainable purchase suggestions. Every recommendation answers the question "why" before you have to ask it: the forecast, the safety stock, the lead time and the current position all live on the same row as the quantity. Edit any number and the projected stock curve updates before anything is committed to Business Central. Purchasers get to challenge the numbers instead of trusting them blind, and controllers see service level, stockouts and excess as daily KPIs rather than monthly autopsies.

uPurchase demand chart with historical, future and forecast curves

Functionalities · 10

Advanced tier

uPurchase · Reordering Rules

Reorder logic you can read at a glance.

Set rules per item, per category, per supplier — and see exactly which rule fired for any given suggestion. The system always tells you which policy produced a recommendation, so you can trust it or override it deliberately.

Rule library, not buried fields

Reorder method (min/max, fixed period, fixed quantity), review cycle, rounding rules, supplier overrides — all live in a library you can read and edit, not scattered across SKU cards.

Rules with receipts

When a suggestion appears, you can trace it back to the rule that produced it. No more "why did the system recommend this".

Inheritance and override

Set a default policy at the category level. Override at the supplier level. Override again at the item level. You see which layer each value came from.

What you see

Rules with receipts.

Every suggestion carries a small badge that names the rule that produced it. Click it and you see the full chain — category default → supplier override → item override → final value. When a number surprises you, you can find out why in two clicks instead of two meetings.

Min/Max, Fixed-Quantity, Fixed-Period, Lot-for-Lot policies
Per-class default rules with item-level override
Rounding: pack quantity, pallet quantity, supplier MOQ
Review cycle: daily, weekly, monthly per class
Supplier-specific overrides (e.g. consolidation cadence)

uPurchase predicted inventory against safety stock and reorder point

When this matters

Signals you'd reach for this.

Reorder points live on the item card

When every SKU has its own buried fields, nobody can audit the policy. Rules at the class level are auditable.

Settings drift over years

Someone tweaked an item three years ago. Nobody remembers why. Now it over-orders. The audit log fixes this.

Pack and pallet rounding is manual

Buyers round up by hand to hit a pallet. The system should do this — and tell you the rounding it applied.

Two products, one supplier, two cadences

A rule that says "consolidate this supplier weekly" is one line. Setting it per item is 400.

FAQ

The questions everyone asks first.

Still wondering? Ask us directly →

Yes. Open production orders, master schedule and dependent demand from BOMs all feed in. A reorder rule on a component doesn't fire blind — it sees what the production floor will need before the demand becomes a stockout.

See uPurchase in a 30-minute demo.

A real screen-share with someone who built it. No slides.

The uTools suite