Stock Inventory
Know what's on the shelf before you cut. Stock counts by profile, alert thresholds, restock tools, and a snapshot saved with every cut plan — so you can rebuild any batch later and see exactly what was on hand.
Know what's on the shelf before you cut. Stock counts by profile, alert thresholds, restock tools, and a snapshot saved with every cut plan — so you can rebuild any batch later and see exactly what was on hand.
Set an initial stock count for each moulding profile — either as linear feet or as a count of sticks at a known length. From that point on, RailChop deducts stock automatically as cuts are completed. The Stock Inventory screen shows a live total per profile, sorted with low-stock items at the top and color-coded by status: green when healthy, amber at the alert threshold, red when out.
You don't have to remember to update anything. The optimizer knows what each cut consumes; the remnant tracker knows what each cut produces. Stock numbers move with the work.
Tap the bell icon on any row to set an alert threshold — the minimum amount of that profile you want on hand. When stock drops to or below the threshold, the row turns amber, the bell icon goes active, and the profile counts toward the Stock Inventory badge in the app's top bar. The threshold marker also shows on the per-profile bar so you can see at a glance how far you've drifted past it.
Different profiles get different thresholds. A high-volume contemporary moulding might need a 60-foot floor; a slow-moving gilded profile might be fine at 20. You set the floor that matches your turnover for each one. Leave a profile blank if you don't want alerts for it.
When new moulding arrives, hit Restock on the row. A sheet opens, you enter the length and quantity of new sticks, and stock updates instantly. No spreadsheet, no separate app, no walking back to the desk. The whole flow takes about ten seconds.
For shops that order in mixed lengths, the restock sheet handles each stick length separately so you keep an accurate picture of what you actually have on the rack — not just total linear feet, but how it's distributed across stick lengths.
This is the part most inventory tools miss. Every time you run an optimization, RailChop captures a snapshot of the stock state at that moment and saves it inside the cut plan. Reopen a batch from last week and you can see exactly what was on the shelf when that plan was generated — how many sticks, what lengths, which remnants were available.
This matters for three reasons. It lets you rebuild any past batch with confidence if something has to be redone. It supports auditing — you can prove what was used and why a particular plan was chosen. And it gives the Shop Dashboard the data it needs to compute true material usage trends over time, not just guesses.
Stock inventory in RailChop is designed for the person standing at the saw, not for someone in a back office reconciling spreadsheets. Updates are one tap. Restocking is a sheet, not a form. Low-stock alerts surface in the same UI you're already using to optimize cuts. There's no separate inventory module to sync, no daily reconciliation step, no end-of-month count.
The whole point is that you should never pull a fresh stick and discover you're now out, with three more orders waiting. The badge tells you before that happens. The dashboard's Low Stock card gives you a tap-through reorder list. The system stays out of the way until something needs your attention.
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