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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.

Include builds checkbox: if checked then mSupply will include confirmed builds (see the 4.07. Building (manufacturing) items page for details) in the usage calculations. If it is not checked (the normal setting) then build will not be included.

Clicking the Show Graph button will replace the table with a graph showing the information selected in the drop down list to its right. Here is an example of a Consumption graph:

The horizontal (X) axis is the period selected on the Months drop down list, the vertical (Y) axis shows the value of the property slected in the drop down list next to the Show/Hide graph button for each month.

You can show consumption, mean stock, days out of stock, projection A and projection B on this graph.

This section allows you to set how mSupply calculates future usage of this item when automatically generating tenders, calculating purchase orders or creating a suggested order report. Refer to the section on Forecasting to see how the lower part of the Usage tab can be used.