I'm Growing Quickly but Don't Want to Run Out of Wax — How Do I Set a Reorder Point Based on Monthly Consumption and Supplier Lead Time?

The formula, one input at a time

A reorder point answers one question: how much wax must be on the shelf at the moment you order, so that you do not run out before the delivery is usable? The answer is the wax you will melt while you wait, plus a buffer for things going wrong. That is all the formula says. Each of its three inputs has a trap, and a growing business falls into all three.

Daily usage. Take the kilos of wax you melted last month from your production log, not the kilos you bought. Buying and melting differ whenever stock levels change, and it is melting that empties the shelf. Divide by 30 to get kilos per calendar day. If your records are in candles, multiply by the wax per candle: a 200 g candle at an 8% load holds 184 g of wax, so 100 candles use 18.4 kg.

Lead time. This is the one makers underestimate. It starts the moment stock touches the reorder point, not the moment you get round to ordering. It includes payment, dispatch, transit and the time it takes you to unpack, weigh and shelve the wax. It is your number, measured on your address and your ordering habits. We do not publish delivery times here, and the 7 days in this example is purely illustrative. Take the longest of your last three orders until you have enough history to do better.

Safety stock. The buffer covers two things: deliveries that take longer than usual, and weeks that sell more than usual. For a growing business there is a third: the month is bigger than the one you based the numbers on. Setting safety stock in days of usage rather than fixed kilos is the simplest protection, because days scale automatically when daily usage rises. This page uses 5 days as an example. I Have Enough Raw Materials for 500 Candles but Sales Are Growing Unpredictably — How Much Safety Stock Should I Maintain? compares four ways to size it from your own data.

Why last month's usage fails a growing business

Here is the example. A maker pours 200 g soy candles at 8% in CSI 464. Month 1 uses 18 kg of wax, about 98 candles. Sales are growing 15% a month, which is the reader's own example rate, not a forecast for your business. Lead time is 7 days and safety stock 5 days, so the reorder point is always 12 days of usage. The question is simply: 12 days of which month?

In month 2 the gap is only 1.08 kg. That looks harmless, and in a month where everything else goes to plan, it is. Growth alone eats 0.63 kg of the 3.45 kg safety stock during a 7-day lead time: about 18% of the buffer, gone before anything has gone wrong. The problem is that the buffer exists for the month when something does go wrong.

There are two ways to build growth in. The first, used in the table, is to forecast this month's usage from your order book and last month's trend, and set the reorder point on it. The second, for makers who prefer not to forecast, is to size safety stock in days of the current month and recalculate on the first of every month. Both work. What does not work is setting the reorder point once, in a slow month, and leaving it on a sticky note for half a year.

Continuous or weekly checks

The reorder point assumes you notice the moment stock touches the line. That is true if you update stock after every pour day. Many small businesses check stock once a week instead. If you do, the formula needs one more term, because stock can fall past the reorder point on Tuesday and nobody notices until the following Monday.

For a weekly check, use an order-up-to level: daily usage × (review gap + lead time) + safety stock. Every Monday, order whatever brings your stock (on hand plus anything already ordered) up to that level. In month 2 of the example, with a 7-day review gap, the level is 0.690 × (7 + 7 + 5) = 13.11 kg. The weekly order is then that level minus what you have. It is a little more wax on the shelf than continuous review, in exchange for only looking once a week.

The last column puts a price on convenience. In month 6 of the example, weekly checking holds about ₹4,286.36 more CSI 464 than checking after every pour day. Some makers will happily pay that for an hour saved each week. Others will not. Either choice is fine, as long as the formula matches the habit. A continuous reorder point with a weekly habit is the most common hidden cause of emergency orders, which I'm Constantly Placing Emergency Raw-Material Orders — How Do I Calculate Minimum Stock Levels for Wax, Fragrance, Wicks and Jars? deals with directly.

There is a physical version of continuous review that needs no stock counting at all: the two-bin method. Keep the reorder quantity sealed and separate, labelled "reorder when opened". In month 3 of the example that is 9.52 kg, which rounds up to 1 × 10 kg of CSI 464. Pour from the open stock. The day you break the seal on the reserve, you order. It works because the trigger is an action you cannot skip, not a number you must remember to check. Update the size of the sealed reserve when you recalculate each month.

Turning the reorder point into packs

Round the reorder point up to something you can count at a glance, never down. Then decide how much to order each time. For wax, a common starting point is one month of forward usage, rounded up to whole packs. The table below does that for each month of the example, using the largest CSI 464 packs first. Because CSI 464 is ₹507.40 a kilo at 1, 5 and 10 kg, the mix of packs does not change the price, only the handling.

Six months of this pattern buys 160 kg for ₹81,184.00. Rounding up to whole kilos adds less than a kilo a month. On a wax with flat per-kilo pricing, there is no reason to round further than that, and no financial reason to buy several months ahead. Should I Keep More Money in Cash or Use It to Buy Larger Quantities of Candle Raw Materials at Better Prices? compares holding cash against buying larger quantities, and My Candle Business Is Growing but All My Cash Keeps Going Back into Wax, Fragrance Oils and Jars — How Much Raw-Material Inventory Should I Actually Hold? shows what the extra cover costs across all four materials.

The waxes in CSI's listed range price differently, and that changes the pack decision:

Only Natural Soy Pearl Wax has a real pack break: ₹450.00 a kilo at 1 kg, ₹424.80 from 5 kg, a 5.6% saving that stays the same at 10 kg and 50 kg. For that wax, set your reorder quantity in 5 kg multiples and you capture the whole saving without buying further ahead. Switching wax is a formulation decision, not a stock decision, so test any change in your own jars before it reaches a customer.

A monthly routine that keeps up

The reorder point is not a one-off calculation. For a growing business it is a monthly habit that takes ten minutes, and the ten minutes are what stop the emergency orders.

Do the same for wicks and jars, which also stop production when they run out. They follow the same formula in units instead of kilos. Fragrance oils are different, because each scent runs at its own speed; My Candle Business Uses 20 Different Fragrance Oils — How Do I Set Separate Reorder Levels for Fast-Selling and Slow-Selling Scents? sets reorder levels scent by scent. If two or more materials keep running out at different times, I'm Running Out of One Raw Material While Having Months of Another — How Do I Synchronise Wax, Fragrance, Wick and Jar Purchasing with Actual Production? shows how to line their reorder cycles up.

Seasonal peaks sit outside this routine. A reorder point handles steady growth. It does not handle a month that is three times the size of the last one, because the buffer is sized for normal variation, not for a festival. Plan Diwali and the November–February wedding season as a separate build-up. My Candle Sales Double During Diwali — How Early Should I Start Increasing Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Before the Season? covers how early to start.

If you would like help checking the arithmetic, send us your monthly usage for the last three months and your usual order dates on WhatsApp. We can suggest pack combinations on our listed prices and quote anything beyond them.

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