What it is
Cover is how long the stock on hand lasts at the rate it is selling: days of cover on one line, weeks of cover on a book or a ledger. It is the figure a buy is read against, because a line with less cover than its lead time will be empty before an order can land.
Cover is a minimum in three senses, and each of them is the reason a figure reads the way it does. A cover figure pooled over many lines is the thinnest of them, the minimum across a style's locations or a range's variants, never an average: an average hides the shop that is already empty. A cover figure that outlasts the forecast is a floor, and prints as a bound, N+: the walk ran out of forecast, not the stock. And the cover you ask for, a policy's trigger, a corridor's minimum, the ledger's cover asked for, is a floor to stay above, never a target to hit exactly: above it the book is long or heavy, below it the book is short.
How Tightly decides it
The replenishment engine walks the forecast day by day, at the grain of a variant in one warehouse, and counts the days until the stock on hand is gone. Nothing on hand is zero days, a stockout, and it is measured. Stock that is unknown reads zero as well, because zero prompts a look where a long runway would suppress one, and the recommendation itself is withheld rather than guessed. Stock that outlasts every forecast day reads the whole horizon walked, flagged as a floor, so two lines that never deplete read alike.
The cover gap is the lead time less the cover on the shelf: the days a line stays empty even if it is ordered today, and the reason a recommendation exists. It is banded on the row, not re-derived on the page: no gap lands in time, up to thirty uncovered days is a gap, and past thirty is the deep gap expediting no longer recovers.
On a rolling commitment, the weekly pace reading is cover rather than sell-through: the share of variants whose thinnest cover sits outside the declared corridor. On the ledger, cover is read at the recent rate and at this week's rate, and Short of cover counts in units what a declared cover target asks for beyond the stock counted. On the plan of record, a closing stock target typed as weeks of cover becomes a level by the planned sales of the weeks that follow, and the conversion is named.
The words on the face
| Word | Where | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Days of cover | Smart Replenishment, Policies | Days until the line runs out at the forecast rate; a line already out reads 0 days · out, with no mark |
| Weeks of cover | The ledger, a commitment's corridor | The same idea in weeks |
| Gap | Smart Replenishment | Lead time less cover, in days; a measured zero reads 0 days |
| Lands in time | The Buy chart, Reorder lines on Pro | Ordered today, the delivery arrives before stock runs out |
| Short for under a month | The Buy chart; Short under a month on Pro Reorder lines | Stock runs out before the delivery lands, by up to a month |
| Short for over a month | The Buy chart; Short over a month on Pro Reorder lines | Empty for more than a month whatever you order; too far behind to expedite |
| No forecast | Policies, Allocation | No forecast to walk, so no cover can be read |
| Stock unknown | Allocation's Excluded warehouses | The count is unknown, so the warehouse is skipped |
On Smart Replenishment the Buy chart splits the buy into the three bands, worst first, and pressing a bar narrows the grid to that band.
What you can do about it
On Smart Replenishment the grid opens on what breaks first, then on what it costs; Add to Bench stages the lines a person accepts, Draft transfers moves stock from a warehouse that holds it, and nothing is ordered until an order is confirmed. On Policies a rule fires when days of cover drop below a figure you set, and Tightly's own recommendation reads days of cover, lead time and profitability on every run. On Pro the same lines are Reorder lines on a commitment's desk, budgeted by its envelope, and a rolling commitment's corridor is where the floor is declared. On the ledger the ways back from a book that is heavy are named, cheapest first, and none is performed for you.
Glossary line
Cover is how long stock lasts at the current rate, in days on a line and weeks on a book; a pooled figure is the thinnest line, a bound prints N+, and the cover asked for is a minimum to stay above, never a target.