MOQs, case packs and order rounding without overbuying

Your reorder calculation says you need 150 units. Your supplier sells in cartons of 24 and won't take an order under $3,000. Somewhere between the maths and the PO, someone makes a call, and over a year those calls decide whether you're carrying a sensible amount of stock or a warehouse full of "well, we had to hit the minimum".

This guide is about making those calls deliberately.

Key takeaways

• Work out the real need first, then apply constraints in order: minimum quantity, then case pack, then order-value minimum.
• If a minimum isn't a multiple of the case size, round the minimum up to whole cases.
• Rounding up isn't always right. Compare the extra days of stock with the risk of the shortfall.
• When a minimum is far above your need, put a number on the cost of the excess before accepting it.
• To reach an order-value minimum, add the products that would need ordering soonest anyway, not whatever is cheapest.

The three kinds of constraint

Minimum order quantity (MOQ) per product. The supplier won't make or sell fewer than, say, 500 units of one SKU. Sometimes the MOQ applies across a style (300 units across all sizes of one shirt) or a material run (one colour of printed box).

Case pack. Goods are packed in cartons of a fixed size, and the supplier ships whole cartons. You might be able to buy any number of cartons, but not part of one.

Order minimum. The whole PO must reach a value (say $3,000) or a volume (a pallet, a container) before the supplier will accept it or before freight makes sense.

Apply them in the right order

Start with the need from your reorder calculation, then:

1. Raise to the MOQ if the need is below it.
2. Round to whole cases.
3. Check the order total against the supplier's minimum, and top up if needed.

One trap: the MOQ and case size don't always line up. If the MOQ is 100 and cases hold 24, you can't order exactly 100. 100 ÷ 24 = 4.17 cases, so the real minimum is 5 cases, or 120 units. Record 120 as the effective minimum so nobody discovers it on the phone with the supplier.

Rounding up versus rounding down

Take a product selling 6 units a day. The need is 150 and cases hold 24.

• 150 ÷ 24 = 6.25 cases.
• Round up to 7 cases = 168 units: 168 − 150 = 18 extra units, which is 18 ÷ 6 = 3 days of extra stock.
• Round down to 6 cases = 144 units: 150 − 144 = 6 units short, which is 6 ÷ 6 = 1 day less cover.

Neither answer is automatically right. Here's the rule of thumb we'd use:

• If the shortfall from rounding down is small compared with your safety stock, and the product isn't a top seller, round down. One day of cover against a buffer of ten is noise.
• If the product is one of your most important lines, or rounding down would eat most of the safety stock, round up.
• If the product is perishable, seasonal or slow, lean towards rounding down: the extra units cost more than they look.

Whichever you choose, be consistent. "Always round up" quietly adds part of a case to every line on every order. Across 60 SKUs, that's tens of cases of stock you never planned to own.

When the MOQ is far bigger than the need

This is where real overbuying happens. Suppose a product sells 4 a day, costs $5, and your normal 30-day order would be 120 units. The supplier's MOQ is 500.

• 500 units at 4 a day lasts 500 ÷ 4 = 125 days, against the 30 you'd normally buy.
• The extra is 500 − 120 = 380 units, or 380 × $5 = $1,900 of stock.
• That extra takes 380 ÷ 4 = 95 days to sell through.

Now put a rough cost on it. If you assume holding stock costs you about 25% of its value a year (storage, capital, insurance, the risk it doesn't sell; use your own figure), an upper bound is $1,900 × 0.25 × 95 ÷ 365 ≈ $124. It's an upper bound because the excess shrinks as you sell it.

Compare that with your alternatives:

• Pay a small-order surcharge. If the supplier would accept 120 units for a $150 surcharge, accepting the MOQ is cheaper on paper, provided the product is stable, won't expire, isn't about to change and you have the cash.
• Share the MOQ. Ask whether it can apply across colours, sizes or scents rather than per SKU.
• Order less often. Accept the MOQ, then skip this product on the next few orders. Make sure your reorder logic sees the stock so it doesn't suggest more.
• Find another supplier if the MOQ is permanently out of proportion to your sales.

The decision changes when cash is tight. $1,900 tied up in one slow product is $1,900 you can't spend on a best seller that's about to stock out. See open-to-buy budgeting for how to prioritise.

Price breaks are minimums in disguise

Suppliers often offer a lower price at a higher quantity. Treat this the same way as an MOQ: compare the saving with the stock you take on.

Say the product above costs $5.00 at 500 units and $4.60 at 1,000. Buying 1,000 saves 1,000 × $0.40 = $400. But it adds 500 more units, which at 4 a day is another 125 days of stock, and costs 1,000 × $4.60 = $4,600 instead of 500 × $5.00 = $2,500, so $2,100 more cash up front. A $400 saving for holding stock an extra four months can be worth it on a steady, non-perishable product. It rarely is on anything new, seasonal or likely to change.

Style-level minimums

When an MOQ applies across a group, scale the group's needs proportionally rather than piling the extra onto one variant. If a shirt has a 300-unit style MOQ and your needs are S 40, M 90 and L 70, the total is 40 + 90 + 70 = 200. Scale by 300 ÷ 200 = 1.5: S 60, M 135, L 105, which sums to 300. Every size gets the same extra cover, rather than one size ending up with months of stock.

Topping up to an order minimum

Say the supplier's minimum is $3,000 and your rounded lines come to $2,460. You're $3,000 − $2,460 = $540 short. Don't fill the gap with whichever product is cheapest. Fill it with products you'll need to buy from this supplier soonest anyway.

X has the least cover, so it goes first. Three cases of X cost 3 × $180 = $540, closing the gap exactly, and three cases is less than a month of X's sales, which you'd have been buying soon regardless. Topping up with Z would have been cheaper per case but would have added months of slow stock.

If nothing on the list is close to needing an order, it's often better to wait a week and combine with the next cycle than to buy stock you don't need.

Check the result in days of cover

After rounding, look at every line's days of cover once the order arrives. Most lines should be clustered around your target. Any line far above the rest is either a minimum you should challenge or a data problem, such as a case size entered as 240 instead of 24.

How Stokrio applies constraints

In Stokrio, replenishment suggestions are rounded to each product's minimum order quantity and case pack, and edits you make on the table are checked against them before they become purchase orders. Supplier costs and case packs can be imported from a spreadsheet using the import tools. The judgment calls above, like when to push back on a minimum, are still yours, but you start from numbers that already respect what the supplier can sell you.