What is a lead time used for, and where do I set it?

A lead time is how many days a reorder takes to arrive, and nouz uses it to tell you what to reorder and by when. It runs from placing the order to having the stock on the shelf. Set the store's default on the Products page, beside the search, and give a product its own in its panel when its supplier is slower or faster.

Every store starts with 30 days. A product's own lead time covers all its variants, since they share a supplier, and emptying the field hands the product back to the store's default. Changing a lead time moves no number on the P&L; it changes only the reorder plans.

Two places read it. Insights, Inventory dates each variant: it runs out when today's stock is gone at the expected pace, it has to be ordered one lead time before that, and the suggested order covers the lead time plus 60 days of sales. The same lead time sorts every variant into Sold out, Restock now, Restock soon, Healthy, Overstocked, Severely overstocked or Dead stock. The Forecast's purchase plan uses it too, together with the safety stock and the weeks you order for, set on its Stock & cash tab.

Shopify does not tell apps when stock on its way will arrive, so the purchase plan counts it as arriving at the end of the lead time: the latest it can come, never earlier than it does. The reorder point calculator does the same arithmetic by hand for a single product.