Which products will run out before Christmas? We asked Claude
Eleven of Tugger & Bone's 62 products will run out before a replacement order can arrive, and nothing is on order. That's the answer Claude gave when we asked it to compare the last 13 weeks of sales in Cin7 Omni with what's on the shelf in the Fareham warehouse, then check whether any purchase orders were on their way. The worst case is a product that sells 107 a week and has two left. This post shows the question, what Claude joined to answer it, what it found, and what we'd do about it on a Monday morning.
The question
Every product business asks some version of this in October. The usual way to answer it is a stock report from Cin7, a sales report from Cin7, a list of open purchase orders, and an hour in Excel working out weeks of cover. Cin7 Omni holds all three, but it doesn't hand you the answer.
Tugger syncs Cin7 Omni into a managed data warehouse and connects that warehouse to Claude through a read-only MCP server, so the question can be asked in one go:
"Using the last 13 weeks of sales orders, work out the weekly sales rate for every product in the Fareham warehouse. Compare it with available stock and anything on open purchase orders. Which products will run out before a new order could arrive, given each supplier's usual lead time?"
What Claude joined
- Sales orders: 60 non-void orders from July to September, 41,896 units across all 62 products, with the web shop's orders included because they land in Cin7 as SHOP- references.
- Stock: available quantity per product at the Fareham branch, after open sales are deducted.
- Purchase orders: all 44 this year, every one fully received, and the incoming column at zero on every product. Nothing is on order.
- Supplier lead times: average days from purchase order to full receipt, by supplier, from the same 44 orders. UK suppliers run 9 to 16 days. Nordic Pet Goods runs 28. Orient Pet Imports runs 34.
Weeks of cover is available stock divided by weekly sales. Where that's shorter than the supplier's lead time, the product runs out before a replacement can land even if you order today.
What it found
| Product | Sold per week | Available | Weeks of cover | Supplier and lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cardboard Scratch Lounger | 107 | 2 | 0.0 | Felis Furniture, 12 days |
| Dog Raincoat, Medium | 114 | 96 | 0.8 | Nordic Pet Goods, 28 days |
| Rabbit Hutch, Single | 8 | 11 | 1.3 | Hutch & Hay, 12 days |
| De-shedding Comb | 139 | 210 | 1.5 | GroomPro UK, 14 days |
| Waterproof Travel Bed | 28 | 44 | 1.6 | No supplier set |
| Tugger XL Bull Rope | 55 | 95 | 1.7 | No supplier set |
| Reflective Night Lead | 73 | 140 | 1.9 | No supplier set |
| Cooling Mat, Large | 18 | 38 | 2.1 | Nordic Pet Goods, 28 days |
| Nail Clippers, Large | 100 | 221 | 2.2 | GroomPro UK, 14 days |
| Snuffle Mat | 78 | 175 | 2.2 | Orient Pet Imports, 34 days |
| Window Perch | 24 | 48 | 2.0 | Felis Furniture, 12 days |
Three things in that table that a stock report on its own wouldn't tell you.
The Scratch Lounger is already gone. It sold 1,388 units in the quarter, £10,470 of revenue, and there are two left. The one web shop order sitting in Cin7 is for eight of them, so it can't ship. Felis Furniture is a 12-day supplier, which means a fortnight with nothing to sell on a line that does £800 a week.
The raincoat is the expensive one. £20,832 of sales in the quarter, the second-highest earner in the range, 96 in stock and 114 a week going out. Nordic Pet Goods takes four weeks. Ordered today, the first replacement lands around the third week of November with the shelf empty for three of those weeks.
Three products have no supplier set in Cin7. The travel bed, the XL Bull Rope and the night lead have no supplier on the product record, so there's no lead time to work out and no obvious person to call. Between them they did £30,000 last quarter. That's a data hygiene job nobody would have spotted from a reorder report, because the reorder report wouldn't have had a row for them.
What to do about it
Claude's suggested actions, in the order it gave them:
- Raise purchase orders today for the Scratch Lounger, the raincoat and the de-shedding comb. These three are £45,000 of quarterly sales and all three are short of a lead time.
- Ring Nordic Pet Goods about air freight or a part-shipment on the raincoats. Four weeks is the gap that costs the most money.
- Set the supplier on the three orphaned products before raising their orders, so next time the question has an answer.
- Hold the web shop order for the Scratch Lounger or offer the customer the 60cm Scratch Post, which has four weeks of cover.
The fourth one is the kind of judgement call Claude will suggest and shouldn't make. It's your customer.
To ask this yourself
You need Cin7 Omni (or Cin7 Core) connected to Tugger, and Tugger's MCP server added to Claude. Both take a few minutes and there's no code. The setup is in how to connect Cin7 to Claude, and the same question works in ChatGPT or Gemini.
If Shopify is your web shop and it isn't pushing orders into Cin7, connect it to Tugger as well and Claude will join the two on SKU. The question is the same; the sales rate just gets a second source. That's covered in connecting Shopify to Claude for reporting.
Once the accounts are in the same warehouse, the follow-up question writes itself: of the eleven products about to run out, which customers are waiting on them, and what do those customers owe us? That's Cin7 and Xero in one question, and it's the one we'd ask next.
See it in action
These are clips from our Ask Tugger Anything webinar, where we put questions like this one to Claude live on the Tugger & Bone data.
Get started
Tugger connects 70+ business systems, including Cin7, Shopify, Xero and HubSpot, to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Try it free for 10 days or book a demo and we'll run this question on your own Cin7 data.
