How to ask about stock, suppliers and marketing

The analyst reaches further than sales figures. This page covers what to ask in each area and what has to be true for it to answer. See How to ask the analyst a question for how to ask.

What can you ask about stock?

What is running out, with stock per location and days of cover, and how big the fulfilment backlog is.

You can also ask which products sell fastest and slowest across the catalogue, or about one named product's units and revenue over any date range.

Worth asking:

• "What is about to run out that is also a strong seller?" The pairing is what matters; a slow product running low is not urgent.
• "How has the merino quarter-zip sold over the last 90 days compared with the 90 before?"
• "Is anything in the backlog blocked on stock?" That crosses two areas at once, which is exactly what a dashboard cannot do.

Day-by-day history reaches back 90 days. For longer than that, ask for totals over a range rather than a series.

What can you ask about suppliers and purchasing?

Who supplies a given brand, and a supplier's lead time, minimum order, payment terms, currency and rep. Which purchase orders are open or late, what stage they are stuck at, what is on them, and what deliveries cost landed. And a supplier's on-time delivery record.

Worth asking:

• "Which purchase orders are late, and what stock are they covering?"
• "What is Portside Mills' on-time record and how many orders is that based on?" The sample size is the part that decides whether it is worth raising, per How to record new terms and check a delivery record.
• "What did the last delivery from Kaimen Knitwear cost landed?"

These need the supplier and purchase order view permissions. Without them the analyst refuses by name and tells you which one to ask an admin for.

Supplier contact details are deliberately not available to the analyst. Those live on the supplier's own page, per How to add a supplier and record their terms.

What can you ask about marketing?

Your Klaviyo audience segments, with their name, size and rough week-over-week trend, and your lifecycle flows with their name, trigger and status.

This matters more than it sounds, because segments and flows have no screen of their own in Tideswell. Asking the analyst is how you see them without opening Klaviyo.

Email & SMS check is the built-in version of this question, per How to use the one-click digest buttons.

Klaviyo has to be connected, and the analyst says so in its caveats rather than guessing when it is not. See How to manage integrations, your workspace name and the audit log.

What can you ask about decisions?

What your business has recorded: what was decided, why, what was rejected, and what the measured outcome was.

This is the one people forget exists, and it is the most interesting. "What did we decide about Portside Mills last season and did it work" is a question no other tool in a brand's stack can answer.

It reports the decision and the outcome side by side and will not claim one caused the other. See What are decisions and track records?.

Decision questions need the decisions view permission.

What can it not answer?

Anything about one person. There is no look-up for an individual customer, an email address or a single order, by design, and it will say so rather than approximating.

For one customer's history use How to find a customer and read their history. For one order use How to look up orders and check your fulfilment backlog.

Why did an answer stop short?

Because it gathers a bounded number of look-ups before it has to answer, which keeps answers arriving in seconds rather than minutes.

A question spanning stock, suppliers, marketing and decisions at once can reach that edge. Ask it as two or three questions in the same conversation instead; the thread is remembered, so the second question keeps the context of the first.