4.01.04. Items - Usage tab

Back to Item Details window

The Usage tab allows you to view the historic item usage per month in the store that you are logged in to. This information is very useful for quickly spotting a trend in usage for a particular item. You can also change how mSupply makes forecasting calculations about this item when creating automatic tenders, calculated purchase orders or suggested ordering reports.

This is what the tab looks like:

The date field above the table on the right hand side shows the range of dates covered by the historic usage information in the table. The last date will always be the current date, the first date will be the number of months in the Months drop down list before the current date.

Below the list of usage for each month there is a drop down list to choose from 1 to 24 months. After choosing a value, the Mean (average) usage and Standard deviation figures will be updated to give the figures for the period chosen (the period is from the selected number of months ago to the current day).

Refresh usage button: This button allows you to update the usage with transactions that were added since you opened the window (this applies to multi-user mode). It also allows you to show the usage with or without build transactions included in the totals, depending on whether or not the Include builds checkbox is checked.

If a user has the View items permission but not the Edit items permission, they are still able to use the functionality described here to investigate the usage of items in the store that they are currently logged in to since this makes no changes to the properties of the item itself.

Show Graph button

Clicking the Show Graph button shows the same information in a graphical format:

One coloured set of bars shows the usage for the current year, another coloured set shows the usage for the previous year (if data is available).

Forecasting

Refer to the section on Forecasting to see how the lower part of the Usage tab can be used.

Previous: 4.01.03. Items - Misc(ellaneous) tab | | Next: 4.01.05. Items - Stock tab