Procurement & Demand Forecasting

Stayantra helps you buy the right amount of stock at the right time — from logging a purchase request and comparing vendor quotes by hand, to a demand forecast that tells you what's actually running low and why you should trust (or not trust) that number.

[!NOTE] This page covers procurement in detail. For a quick summary alongside the rest of daily operations, see Operations & Management.

1. Purchase Requests & Vendor Quotes

Ordering supplies (linen, F&B stock, toiletries, maintenance parts) starts with a purchase request:

Create a request: Add one or more line items (item, quantity), and tag the request by department — housekeeping, F&B, maintenance, front office, or other.
Log vendor quotes: As vendors respond, you enter their quotes by hand, line by line — price and quantity per item, per vendor. Stayantra does not contact suppliers or collect quotes automatically; this is a manual RFQ log.
Approve a winning quote: Once you've compared the quotes you've entered, you pick the winning one per line and approve it.
Purchase order: Approving a quote generates the purchase order sent to that vendor.

2. Demand Forecast Engine

Every stocked item gets a demand forecast — this is included free on every plan, including Base Camp. Stayantra shows you the number for free and sells the tools that act on it (see the Bulk-Buy Advisor below).

Each item is classified by its demand pattern, and every forecast is honest about where its number came from. A forecast is labeled by its data source, so you can see how much to trust it at a glance:

Backed by an actual stock count.
Backed only by staff issue records (what's been pulled from stock).
Backed only by purchase records (what's been bought, with no issue or count history).
A starting estimate, for an item with no history yet.

3. Suggested Order & Bulk-Buy Advisor

[!IMPORTANT] This is a paid feature, available from the Ascent plan and up as part of the Procurement & Inventory module. See Plans & Billing for module pricing.

The Bulk-Buy Advisor turns the demand forecast into an actual shopping list, grouped by vendor. For every item where a vendor is offering a bulk-buy discount, it gives you one of three recommendations:

Accept — the discount is worth it.
Marginal — close call, read the numbers before deciding.
Decline — buying more than you need isn't worth it here.

Decline is a real, common answer: a bulk discount only pays for itself if the savings beat the extra cost of carrying that stock and tying up cash for longer. For each recommendation, the Advisor shows its math in plain language — money saved vs. carrying cost vs. cash tied up, plus spoilage risk for anything perishable that would expire before it's used.

Suggested baskets respect your hotel's real cash budget and storage space, and the Advisor flags it when a vendor's minimum order size (MOQ) is forcing you to buy months of unnecessary stock just to qualify.

4. Reorder Points & Safety Stock

Stayantra calculates a reorder point and safety stock level automatically for each item, based on that item's actual vendor lead times. If a vendor doesn't have enough delivery history yet, a sensible default is used until real lead-time data builds up. This is what drives the "time to reorder" flag you see on an item.

5. Stock Counts & Goods Receipt

Stock counts move through a draft → submitted → approved workflow. Approving a count corrects the recorded stock level for that item, and every adjustment is written to the audit ledger.

Goods receipt happens when a delivery arrives against a purchase order:

A single PO can be received across multiple partial shipments as deliveries come in.
You cannot receive more than what was ordered — over-receiving is blocked.
Each vendor's on-time and quality score is tracked automatically from their receiving history, so repeated late or short deliveries show up over time.

6. Bootstrapping Forecasts for New Hotels

A brand-new hotel has no purchase or issue history to forecast from. To skip the cold start, you can import 6–12 months of past vendor invoices during onboarding — see Onboarding & Data Import — so the demand forecast has real data to work from from day one instead of starting on estimates alone.