How it works, and what the team needs to keep accurate
Who this is for. Everyone working on stock and orders — Paula in Colombia, Gaby and Veronica in the UK, and Sharon. It explains what the system does, the three dashboards you'll use, and — most importantly — which pieces of information in Katana have to be kept accurate for the dashboards to be right.
The one thing to remember. The dashboards are only ever as good as what's in Katana. They don't invent data — they read it, every morning. If a date, a category, or a stock count is wrong in Katana, it will be wrong on the dashboard too. The Critical Katana inputs section below is the checklist that keeps everything honest.
Our products are made by hand in Colombia and Venezuela, with lead times of 12–20 weeks. That long gap between ordering and receiving is why stock and order planning matters so much: we have to know what to make, when, and for whom, well in advance.
The system does three jobs:
Katana is the single source of truth. All sales — both the website (DTC) and wholesale (B2B) — flow into Katana, because Shopify is connected to it. So we never count sales twice, and we never have to look in two places. Everything the dashboards show is read from Katana (plus the product tags in Shopify, and DHL for delivery status).
It refreshes itself every morning. At 6am, automatically, the system pulls the latest data from Katana, looks up DHL deliveries, recalculates everything, and republishes all three dashboards. You don't have to run anything — you just open the page and it's current. Each dashboard shows a “data last updated” stamp so you know how fresh it is.
Where to find it. All three dashboards live here, behind your @casalatina.co.uk login (a one-time code by email — no password, no app). The data is commercially sensitive, so the login keeps it to the team only.
The planning view: what we should make and move, ahead of demand. It answers what to produce, what to transfer Colombia→London, what can't be built because a component is short, and the full stock-type detail for every product. It classifies products A/B/C by revenue, measures how steady or lumpy each one's demand is, and sets a safety buffer accordingly. Used most by Paula.
The live view of every client order. Each open B2B order shows its promised date and a colour status (on track → very late). Click any order to drill into the products and see what's holding it up — in stock, in transit, in production, or still to order. Tabs cover Ready to ship, To transfer to London, To order from suppliers, Deliveries (DHL status) and a Timeline. Used most by Gaby & Veronica (packing, client updates, deliveries) and Paula (production, transfers).
Takes everything the other two work out and turns it into a clear, per-person to-do list — so nobody has to interpret the data themselves.
Each task is tagged High / Medium / Normal from the urgency in the data, and you can download your own list as a spreadsheet.
Colombia (production hub). Places purchase orders to the artisans and receives finished stock. It does not sell. Purchase orders land here.
London (commercial arm). All sales come through London, and most orders ship from here. London does not produce — it gets its stock either directly from suppliers or via a transfer from Colombia.
The journey of a made-to-order item: client order comes in → decision to produce → Paula raises a PO to the artisans in Colombia → artisan gives an estimated date → stock is received in Colombia → Paula creates a stock transfer to London → London receives it → we ship to the client. For large or urgent orders we sometimes ship directly from Colombia instead.
Setting the fulfilment location (now simpler). Just set an order's fulfilment location to where it's actually being shipped from. You no longer need the old two-step of marking it Colombia while in production and then flipping it to London after the transfer — the system now works out where the stock sits on its own, from the live inventory and transfer data. That removes a manual step that used to cause orders to look stuck in the wrong place. You'll still get a “receive incoming transfer” reminder on the Team Tasks dashboard when stock lands in London, so it gets booked in.
| Katana input | Why it is critical | Who keeps it right |
|---|---|---|
| Customer category (Retail / Designer / Events / Hospitality / B2C) |
This single field decides how we treat a customer's demand: Retail and Designer → we hold only a 33% buffer (they wait for bulk); DTC / B2C → we hold full stock; Events & Hospitality → made-to-order, excluded from stock targets. A miscategorised or blank customer skews demand, safety stock and the whole reorder list. | Whoever creates the customer record (Sharon / Paula) |
| Sales order required / delivery date | This is the promised date that drives the whole Order Tracking board — the RAG status (on-track → very late), slip alerts to clients, and task priority. If it's wrong, the board lies and we either chase the wrong orders or miss a real slip. | Whoever enters the order (Sharon) |
| Purchase order expected / arrival date (per line) | The single most important date in the system. This is the artisan's estimated date — and artisan dates slipping is our core problem. The engine uses it to say an item is “in production, arriving on X”. If it's stale or missing, late production looks on-time and nobody chases it. | Paula |
| PO received (mark the line received when stock arrives) | When stock physically arrives, the PO line must be marked received. Until it is, the system keeps counting those units as still-incoming — so a new order looks covered when the stock is actually already sitting on the shelf (or was double-counted). | Paula |
| Stock transfer status & destination (INTRANSIT / RECEIVED, to-location = London) |
Colombia→London transfers are how London gets most of its stock. The status tells us what is genuinely en route (INTRANSIT) versus a draft or already received. Wrong status means in-transit stock is invisible (we re-order it) or received stock still shows as on the water. | Paula creates; Gaby & Veronica receive |
| Fulfilment location on the order line (set to where the order actually ships from) |
Set this to wherever the order is genuinely shipping from. You no longer need to flip it from Colombia to London as production moves — the system now works out where the stock sits on its own, from the live inventory and transfer data. Just keep it set to the true ship-from location. | Paula / Gaby & Veronica |
| Inventory on-hand per location | The foundation everything else is calculated from. If the physical count in London or Colombia is out, every downstream number — what to ship, transfer, produce — is out with it. | Gaby & Veronica (London); Paula (Colombia) |
| Carrier field on shipments = “DHL” (entered consistently) | The Deliveries tab looks up DHL tracking automatically. A blank or messy carrier field is the main reason a shipment doesn't appear. Entering “DHL” consistently (and the tracking number) makes courier and customs issues visible. | Gaby & Veronica |
To save effort: the system deliberately ignores some Katana fields because we calculate better versions ourselves from sales history. You don't need to keep these tidy:
One helpful (not critical) field: the per-product lead time. We fall back to a 16-week default where it's missing, but an accurate lead time per product sharpens the “order-by” dates.
Shopify product tags. Whether we re-stock a product is decided by its Shopify tag: STOCK (we hold stock — re-order it), MADE_TO_ORDER, DISCONTINUED, plus OFK (one-of-a-kind) and bundle. A genuine stock product left untagged is silently dropped from re-ordering — so any new stocked line must get the STOCK tag. This is Sharon's to maintain.
| “What do I ship today?” | Team Tasks → your list (pack list on Mon/Wed/Fri), or Order Tracking → Ready to ship. |
| “Which orders are late?” | Order Tracking — anything amber or red. Team Tasks turns these into client-contact and chase tasks. |
| “What do we need to make / re-stock?” | Stock & Reorder → To produce; Order Tracking → To order from suppliers for order-specific shortfalls. |
| “What needs transferring to London?” | Order Tracking → To transfer to London; Stock & Reorder → To transfer. |
| “Where's a shipment?” | Order Tracking → Deliveries (DHL status). |
| “Is the data current?” | Check the “data last updated” stamp at the top of any dashboard. It refreshes by itself at 6am daily. |
Questions or something looks wrong? Flag it to Sharon — most “wrong” numbers trace back to one of the critical Katana inputs above.