Sage 300 Warehouse Alerts: Reorder Point, Stock Receipt and Delivery Notifications

What Sage 300 offers natively

Sage 300 already holds most of the information an alert needs. In Inventory Control (I/C), the Reorder Quantities screen lets you set reorder levels for each item at each location. In this guide, I call the level that should trigger a reorder the reorder point. The I/C Reorder Report then lists the items that have fallen below those levels.

What Sage 300 doesn’t do out of the box is tell anyone. The reorder report only helps if someone remembers to run it, and there’s no built-in message when a receipt is posted, a shipment goes out or a count is finished. Someone has to go looking.

For a small team that runs the reorder report every morning, that can be enough. It starts to fall short when stock moves quickly, when the person who needs to know isn’t the person at the desk, or when you want to hear about a problem the same hour it happens rather than the next day.

Which Sage 300 warehouse alerts are worth having

It’s tempting to alert on everything. The useful alerts tend to fall into a handful of groups.

Reorder point and stock alerts

• An item drops below its reorder point
• An item at a location goes out of stock
• A bin or pick face needs replenishing from overstock
• Inventory goes negative, which usually means something was shipped or consumed before it was received. This only applies if negative inventory is allowed in your I/C Options.

Stock receipt notifications

• A purchase order (PO) is received
• A receipt comes in from a particular vendor
• A PO the production team is waiting on has arrived

Stock receipt notifications are most useful for specific cases rather than every receipt. The buyer who placed a rush order, or the production lead waiting on a component, usually wants to know the moment it’s on the shelf.

Delivery alerts

Delivery alerts can mean two things, and both are worth considering:

• Outbound: a sales order (SO) has shipped. This can go to your own team (an order for a key customer is out the door) or to the customer, with the tracking number.
• Inbound: a supplier delivery has arrived and been received, which overlaps with the stock receipt notifications above.

Customer-facing delivery alerts often come from your shipping software rather than Sage 300, since that’s where the tracking number is created.

Exception alerts

• A shipment goes out short, or a backorder is created
• A receipt comes in over or under the quantity on the PO
• An operator overrides a lot number, bin or quantity
• A transaction fails to post

Exceptions are where I’d start. They’re the events an operations manager actually needs to act on, and they’re the ones most likely to be discovered too late.

Lot and expiry alerts

• A lot will expire within a set number of days
• A lot on quality hold has been received

For food, chemical and other lot-tracked inventory, an expiry alert a few weeks early is usually worth more than any of the others.

Daily summary

A single end-of-day message such as “87 orders shipped, 14 receipts, 3 exceptions” gives a manager the picture without a message for every transaction.

Making reorder point notifications useful

Low-stock alerts sound simple, but a few details decide whether people trust them or start ignoring them.

Use the reorder points you already have

If your reorder levels are already set up in Sage 300, one approach is to have alerts read from there rather than maintaining a second list. When purchasing updates a reorder level, the alert follows automatically. You might keep a separate threshold only for things Sage 300 doesn’t track, such as a minimum quantity in a forward pick bin.

Choose on hand or available

On hand is what’s physically on the shelf. Available is on hand minus what’s already committed to open sales orders. An alert on available warns you earlier, when orders are being entered against stock that’s already spoken for. An alert on on-hand quantity tells you when the shelf itself is running empty. Both are useful; it helps to decide which one each alert is watching.

Alert when the reorder point is crossed, not every time stock is low

If an alert fires every time an item below its reorder point is shipped, a slow-to-arrive item can send the same warning ten times a day. A better pattern is to alert once when stock drops below the reorder point, then stay quiet until it’s been replenished above it again.

Watch every change, not just some

Stock in Sage 300 changes from many places: scanner transactions, shipments and receipts entered at a desk, imports, adjustments and assemblies. An alert that only watches one of those sources will miss changes from the others, and people stop trusting an alert the first time it misses something. A common approach is to check right after a transaction and also run a scheduled check every so often to catch anything else.

Where alerts should go

Email is the usual default, and for most companies the easiest option is to send through their own mail server. Internal alerts sent to people in the same company are simpler still, since most mail systems let an application on the office network send to internal mailboxes with little setup.

If you’re on Microsoft 365, one thing to plan for: Microsoft is turning off the older way of sending mail with a stored username and password by default at the end of December 2026. Many copiers that scan to email were set up that way, so copying their settings may not keep working. Your IT provider can set up an SMTP relay instead, which sends to internal mailboxes without a stored password.

Microsoft Teams is worth considering too. A Teams workflow can give you a web address that posts a message to a channel, so an alert goes to a “Warehouse” channel where the whole team sees it on their phones, with no mailbox involved. Many warehouse supervisors prefer this to email.

Text messages work for the few alerts that really can’t wait, such as a failed posting during a shipping rush. They usually cost per message, so I’d keep them for the urgent ones.

How many alerts is too many

A warehouse shipping 150 orders a day will produce 150 shipment emails a day. Within a week, most managers will have a rule moving them to a folder nobody opens, and the one alert that mattered gets buried with them.

One way to avoid this is to give each type of alert one of three settings:

Filters such as “only these customers” or “only orders over a certain value” can cut the volume further.

Tools for Sage 300 warehouse alerts

There are a few ways to add alerts to Sage 300. They differ mainly in where they get their information.

General alerting tools

These tools watch Sage 300 data and send a message when a condition you define is met.

• Sage Alerts & Workflow (built on Vineyardsoft’s KnowledgeSync) is sold through Sage partners. It comes with 55 pre-configured Sage 300 conditions, and can also automate report delivery and approval workflows.
• Codeless Platforms offers Sage 300 warehouse and inventory alerts by email and text message, built on its BPA Platform. It also offers Sage 300 delivery alerts that notify customers when their goods have shipped.
• Orchid Extender from Orchid Systems runs inside Sage 300. It can watch selected fields and send an email when they change, and also handles audit logging, workflows and screen customizations.
• BAASS Alerts is an alerts add-on for Sage 300, which BAASS says can also automate purchase order generation when stock runs low.

These are a good fit if you want alerts across your whole system, including accounts receivable, purchasing and finance, not just the warehouse. Since they work from Sage 300 data, they see the result of a transaction once it’s in Sage 300: stock is low, an order has shipped.

Alerts from your warehouse scanning system

A barcode scanning or warehouse management system (WMS) knows things the database doesn’t: which operator scanned the item, which bin it came from, that a pick came up short on the floor, or that someone overrode a lot number. Alerts from the scanning system can report those floor-level events as they happen.

At ACCU-DART, we’re currently building warehouse alerts into our Sage 300 barcode scanning software. This work is in progress. If you have an alert you’d like to see, I’d like to hear about it.

The two approaches can also work together: a general tool for finance and purchasing alerts, and the scanning system for what happens on the warehouse floor.

Frequently asked questions

Does Sage 300 have low-stock alerts built in?

Not as push notifications. Sage 300 stores reorder levels in I/C Reorder Quantities and lists items below them in the I/C Reorder Report, but someone has to run the report. Sending an alert takes an add-on.

Can Sage 300 send a notification when stock is received?

Not on its own. Stock receipt notifications take an alerting tool or a scanning system that sends a message when a PO receipt is posted. Most people limit these to specific vendors or POs someone is waiting on.

Can Sage 300 send delivery alerts to customers?

Not natively. Customer delivery alerts usually come from an alerting add-on or from your shipping software, which creates the tracking number.

Can alerts go to more than one person?

Yes, with most tools. A common setup is purchasing for reorder point alerts, the operations manager for exceptions, and a shared Teams channel for everything else.

Do alerts slow down posting in Sage 300?

They shouldn’t. Well-designed alert tools send messages separately from the posting itself, so a slow mail server doesn’t hold up a shipment.

Can I get alerts for lot expiry dates?

Yes, if your items are lot-tracked with expiry dates in Sage 300. An alert a set number of days before expiry gives you time to sell, use or move the stock.

What’s the best way to start?

Pick two or three alerts that cover a problem you’ve already had, such as a stock-out on a key item or a short shipment nobody caught, and run them for a few weeks. Add more once people are reading and acting on the first ones.

Wrapping up

Sage 300 already has most of the information warehouse alerts need. What it’s missing is the push: getting the right event to the right person while there’s still time to act on it. Starting with a few exception and reorder point alerts, and keeping the volume low enough that people actually read them, will usually do more than alerting on everything.

If there’s an alert you’d like to see in ACCU-DART, or you’d like to talk through which ones make sense for your warehouse, we’re happy to hear from you.