Dash Captain is in early access — we're onboarding sellers in waves.
Join early accessInventory runway
Days of stockHow many days your current stock will last at your real sales pace.
Inventory runway is units in stock divided by your daily sales rate — how long the stock lasts before you run out. Watching it (adjusted for growth) lets you reorder before a stockout, not after. Run out of a bestseller and you lose the sales and your hard-won rank.
In practice
Inventory runway converts a stock count into the only unit that matters for planning: time. "400 units left" means nothing without knowing how fast they leave; "23 days of cover" tells you immediately whether your 30-day lead time is about to become a stockout. It's the difference between a number you look at and a number you can act on.
It's only as good as the sales rate behind it, which is where most runway forecasts quietly fail. A 30-day average sailing into a seasonal peak will overstate your cover badly, and a single bulk order can distort the rate for weeks. Compare runway against lead time rather than a fixed threshold — a fast-replenishing local product is fine at 20 days, while something shipping from overseas needs months.
Formula
Days of stock = Units in stock ÷ adjusted daily sales
Example: 3,800 units ÷ 22/day = ~173 days of stock.
What a good result depends on
Enough to comfortably cover your lead time plus a safety buffer.
Common mistakes
- Using flat average sales when demand is growing or seasonal.
- Ignoring that lead times stretch around peak seasons.
Questions people ask
- How many days of stock should I hold?
- Enough to cover your lead time plus a safety buffer for demand that runs hot. A product replenished in a week needs far less cover than one on a 90-day container.
- What sales rate should I base it on?
- Recent enough to reflect current demand, long enough to smooth noise — 14 to 30 days suits most catalogues. Adjust deliberately when a promotion or season means the recent past isn't a fair guide.
- How is runway different from a reorder point?
- Runway is time remaining; a reorder point is the stock level that should trigger the purchase order. Runway tells you how worried to be, the reorder point tells you when to act.