Retail Inventory Management Planner

The problem

Retail inventory apps built with AI tools fail in the same ways again and again:

• The stock count is a number anyone can edit, with no movement history. Nobody can explain why the shelf says 8 and the system says 14.
• The stocktake is a plain table. It should be a count session with a variance review and a commit you can audit.
• Purchase orders exist but have no receiving state, so stock arrives and someone edits quantities by hand.
• Low stock is a card that only shows a number. It should be a queue you act on.
• Transfers are faked with a plus and a minus adjustment.
• Scan and label flows only work as demos.
• Dashboard widgets are decoration.
• Junk test data fills the queues a buyer sees on first load.

This planner is written so the generated spec rules these failures out. Every change that affects a quantity goes through a movement ledger that cannot be edited, with a reason and the person who made it. Every lifecycle (count, order, receive, transfer, return) has real states and no shortcuts.

What it is built from

The planner comes from a counted research pass over 120 retail-only source rows: Shopify Stocky (which is being shut down, so stores are moving off it now), Square, Lightspeed, Hike, Loyverse, RetailEdge, KORONA, Erply, Heartland and Epos Now, together with open-source systems, marketplace scripts and discussion threads where store staff describe their problems. A further 45 UI/workflow reference rows cover the screens themselves.

That pass produced 34 counted feature rows: 27 core product families, 3 branch families, 3 boundary decisions and 1 data-hygiene rule. Each row records how many sources give direct evidence for it:

• On-hand stock tracking by item and location: 32 of the 120 rows.
• The item/SKU master, and the full purchase-order lifecycle: 24 each.
• Physical stocktake: 23.
• Reports and exports: 21.
• Receiving against POs: 18.
• The low-stock reorder queue: 17.
• Store-to-store transfers: 15.
• Barcode label generation, and the drill-down stock dashboard: 14 each.
• The movement ledger itself: 12.

These counts are research evidence that shows direction. They are no promise about any one product. A coding agent cannot produce them unless it repeats the research.

Each row has a default delivery tier (Core Basic, Core Moderate, Core Advanced, Branch or Boundary), so the generated spec proposes the workflows that retail products commonly ship before the rare ones.

Tested in a build-off

Four coding models built eight working retail inventory apps from this planner: GPT-5.5 in four build runs, Composer 2.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Grok 4.5 in two runs. All eight run as live demos you can log into from this page, and the full audited ranking is published as a PlanSmith benchmark.

Harbor Lane General Store, ranked Best Overall in the build-off. You can log into it from the demos below.

What you get

A structured interview that makes you take the retail decisions before any code is written: store and location model, roles (owner/admin, stock clerk, purchaser, cashier), item/SKU master with categories and units, variant/matrix handling for size and color, opening stock and CSV import, the movement-ledger rule, adjustment reasons including damage and shrinkage, full and cycle count workflows, the low-stock, purchase order and receiving loop, barcode label and scan levels, transfers, vendor returns, valuation and velocity analytics, exports, and UI priority.

After discovery, a forbidden-family scan keeps neighbouring scope out unless you select it. POS checkout, ecommerce sync, accounting ledgers and warehouse operations (bins, pick/pack, putaway) are boundary families. They belong to their own planners and do not enter a retail stock build.

The output is one complete build spec written for your tool: CLAUDE.md for Claude Code or AGENTS.md for ChatGPT Codex. Each build step names the tables it touches, the screens it produces and its seed data, and has a firm acceptance check before the next step begins.

What it covers

Basic: single store, owner/admin and stock clerk roles, item/SKU master with search and filters, opening stock with a preview before the import is committed, the movement ledger that cannot be edited, manual stock in/out/adjustment with reasons, a low-stock action queue, full stocktake with variance commit, a stock dashboard with drill-downs, reports and exports, and an audit trail.

Moderate adds: variants and matrix products, item photos and merchandising details, supplier directory, the purchase-order lifecycle, receiving against POs and without one, cycle counts, barcode label printing, scan-to-search and scan-to-count, and damage/shrink reason codes.

Advanced covers: store-to-store transfers that show stock in transit, vendor returns, inventory valuation and margins, sell-through and dead-stock analytics, and pack-size ordering as an optional branch.

Every branch needs your selection before it enters the build. POS, ecommerce and warehouse operations stay out.