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 is read only and 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.

The Months drop down list alllows you to choose how many months usage data to show in the table, from 1 to 60 (5 years!). After choosing a value, the Mean usage (average) 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 i.e. the period shown in the Date field above the right hand side of the table).

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.

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).

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