Running your store on OnHand

OnHand keeps one dashboard for your whole store — a running list of every order that's coming up, due today, or already sent, organised by supplier. There's nothing to install to get started: it works straight from a browser, on a phone, tablet, or the computer at the front counter.

Signing in

Only the store owner has a login. On the sign-in screen, enter the owner's email address and OnHand sends a one-time link — click it and you're in. There's no password to remember or reset: a fresh link is sent every time, and each one expires after 15 minutes and works only once.

Everyone else on the team uses a kiosk password instead of signing in individually — set one any time from Store settings (or right at signup) and hand it to the team along with your store's address. On the shared iPad or counter computer, they go to yourstore.onhand.store/kiosk, type the password once, and they're straight into the dashboard — no email, no login. Approving or rejecting an order is the one thing that still needs a manager to confirm who they are, and that's done with a short PIN rather than a full login (more in Manager approval).

Add it to the home screen

On the device you'll use for the daily walk, open your store's OnHand address and add it to the home screen (in Safari: the Share icon, then Add to Home Screen; in Chrome: the menu, then Install app). It opens full-screen like a normal app from then on, and stays usable if the connection drops mid-count — anything entered while offline is saved on the device and sent through automatically the moment it reconnects.

The dashboard opens on today. Four tiles at the top summarise the day — Due today, At risk, Critical, and Missed — and below them, a card for every order coming up over the next few days, one per supplier.

OnHand only makes noise about orders that actually need attention. A supplier that isn't due yet, or one you've already sent, sits quietly on the schedule — you won't get a badge or an alert for something that's on track.

The dashboard for a store with two orders due today, both already counted, and one order that missed its cutoff overnight.

The four states

Tap any card to open that order and start (or continue) the walk. Cards for orders further out on the schedule are open too — if you know you'll be away on the actual due day, you can walk and send an order early.

This is the core of OnHand — physically walking the floor or the storeroom with a phone or tablet in hand, entering what's actually left of each product, and letting OnHand work out how much to order.

A produce order mid-walk — each line shows the suggested quantity and, underneath it, exactly how OnHand arrived at that number.

1. Open the order from the dashboard

   Tap the supplier's card. You'll see every product on that supplier's list, one row each, with an Est. SOH (estimated stock-on-hand) column showing what OnHand expects is left, based on your last count and typical sales since.

2. Enter the real count

   Walk the shelf and type the actual quantity into SOH count for each line. This is the one number in the whole flow that has to come from you looking at the shelf — everything downstream is calculated from it.

3. Review the suggested order quantity

   The Order qty box updates the instant you type a count — no extra tap, no waiting. It's how much OnHand thinks you need to cover the store until the next delivery, based on how fast that product has actually been selling, and it keeps recalculating live as you adjust the count. It's a starting point, not a decision: change the number for any line right there in the box, for any reason — a delivery you know is coming in another way, a product you're discontinuing, anything you know that the numbers don't.

4. Add notes or a PO number, if you need one

   Two kinds of note, both optional. A small field next to each product carries something about that one item — "only send if ripe," "check use-by before accepting" — and shows up right under that line on the order. A free-text field under the whole product list carries an instruction for the order as a whole — "leave at back door," a specific contact. Both travel with the order everywhere it goes: the PDF, the order email, and the order text if the supplier gets one that way. If your store issues its own purchase order numbers, type one into PO number; leave it blank and OnHand generates one automatically.

5. Send it

   Enter Your name at the top of the screen and tap Send order. That's the only way an order goes out — OnHand never sends anything automatically on its own, even a full, correctly-suggested order still needs this explicit tap. If anything's been typed but never saved, OnHand asks first — save now and carry on, or go back and finish up — so a send can never quietly go out against numbers that never actually made it to the server.

If a count you enter is a long way from what OnHand expected to see on the shelf (comparing it against Est. SOH), the line is flagged rather than silently accepted. It won't block you from finishing the walk on the other lines, but that one line can't be included in an order until you either fix the number or confirm it's correct.

If you're sure the count is right — a genuinely slow week, a delivery that hasn't been logged yet, a real stocktake correction — tap Yes, this count is correct and it goes through as entered.

Running a special on a product usually means it sells much faster than normal for a while — and if that faster rate got blended straight into the everyday sales average, OnHand would keep over-ordering it long after the promotion ends. Marking a line as on special keeps its own separate, independent record of sales during the promo, so the moment it's switched off, ordering picks straight back up from the normal rate as if the spike never happened.

On the walk screen, each line has a checkbox at the end of the row to mark it on special, plus a date picker for when the special ends. Untick it any time to end it early, or let it clear itself automatically once the end date passes.

Some suppliers are worth a manager's sign-off before the order actually goes out — a big meat order, say, versus the routine bread delivery. This is turned on per supplier (see Suppliers) — most stay off.

If you're doing the walk

Nothing changes about counting or sending — tap through exactly as usual. When a supplier requires approval, the button simply reads Submit for approval instead of Send order, and every manager with an email on file gets notified straight away.

If you're the manager

Open the Approvals tab to see anything waiting. Each one shows exactly what was counted and what's about to be ordered — review it and either approve it (it goes straight to the supplier) or reject it with a short reason, which sends it back to the team to fix and resubmit.

Approving or rejecting asks for your Manager name and PIN right there — a short, four-to-six digit code, not a full password, entered fresh every time. It's set up for you on the Team page and exists purely to confirm which manager is signing off, on a device the whole team shares.

A meat order waiting on the Approvals tab — full line-by-line detail, plus the manager/PIN fields to approve or reject it.

Or straight from the notification

The email and text you get when an order needs your sign-off each include their own one-tap link. Tap it, review the same line-by-line detail right there, then approve or reject — no need to open OnHand, sign in, or enter a PIN. It's yours alone: nobody else's copy of that email or text can use it, and once you've acted on it, it's done — tapping it again just shows what happened.

If a supplier's cutoff passes with nothing sent, the order shows Missed on the dashboard — but the screen doesn't lock. You can still open it, count it, and send it late exactly as normal; OnHand would rather you send a late order than none at all.

If a missed order genuinely isn't going out — you called the supplier directly, or handled it another way — a manager can tap Dismiss order (PIN required, same as approving) to clear it off the dashboard. It's still recorded as missed in the audit log; dismissing just tells the dashboard it's been dealt with, so it stops sitting there looking unresolved.

Everything on the dashboard is generated from your supplier setup — the Suppliers tab is where you tell OnHand how each one actually works.

Three suppliers, each with its own order/delivery days and cutoff — this is what builds the whole dashboard schedule.

Add products to a supplier from its detail page — each one needs a pack size and, for a brand-new product with no sales history yet, a starting estimate of daily sales. OnHand learns the real rate from your counts within a few cycles and quietly replaces that starting guess.

Editing a supplier — two separate order/delivery pairs here, since this one takes orders twice a week on different lead times.

Not every order day is weekly — a supplier who only visits every fortnight, or once a month, works the same way: set "Repeats" on that order day and pick the date of the first order. OnHand counts from there, so the dashboard only expects a count and a send on the weeks that are actually "on," and stays silent on the weeks in between.

Every supplier's own page also keeps an order history underneath its details — past orders sent, most recent first, with who sent it, when, and how many lines. Tap any of them to see exactly what went out.

Adding a supplier without typing it in yourself

Two shortcuts skip re-typing a supplier's product list by hand — both land you on the same schedule setup as adding one manually, since order days and cutoffs still stay yours to configure either way.

Either way, a newly-added supplier still needs at least one order day set before OnHand can build a schedule around it — you're dropped straight into that setup screen right after adding.

On Settings → Team, add anyone who needs to approve or reject orders as a manager, with a name, a PIN, and — if you want them to receive approval-request emails or SMS alerts — an email address and phone number. There's no separate account or login for them; the PIN is the entire check, re-entered on the spot each time they approve or dismiss something.

Team members who only ever do the walk don't need to be added here at all — they just type their name into the Your name field on the walk screen each time.

Every order email and approval request goes out automatically — nothing to configure. Text-message alerts are optional, on paid plans, and each one is its own switch on Settings, off by default:

Store-wide defaults — every one of these can still be overridden per supplier or per product.

Your store's own web address (yourstore.onhand.store) is also shown here, read-only, for bookmarking or sharing with a new team member — pair it with the kiosk password above so they can actually get in.

Upgrade, downgrade, or update card details any time from Settings → Billing — it opens a secure Stripe-hosted page, so your card details never pass through OnHand directly.

The Support tab is the direct line to the OnHand team — open a ticket, describe what's happening, and reply in the same thread once someone responds. No phone tree, no separate portal.

The Audit tab is a plain, chronological record of everything that's happened on your account — every order sent, every approval or rejection, every missed cutoff. Useful for settling "who sent that order" without having to ask around.

This chapter is for wholesalers and suppliers, not store owners. If you run a shop, everything you need is in chapters 1–15.

A supplier account lets you keep one product list that any store on OnHand can find and add to their own ordering schedule. You maintain the list — codes, descriptions, pack sizes, and whether something is actually available this week — and every store that has added you sees the current state without you having to ring or email anyone. Stores still set their own order days, cutoff times and delivery days; those are theirs, not yours.

Getting set up

Most suppliers land here through a link, not a sign-up form: if a store you already supply sends you an order through OnHand, the order email carries a one-click claim your free OnHand supplier portal link at the bottom. Follow it, add a business name, your name, an email and a password, and you're set up — free, no card needed. We pre-fill a starting product list from what that store (and any other OnHand store already ordering from you) has been ordering, so there's something real to edit rather than a blank page; fix or remove anything that's wrong before it goes live.

Prefer the personal route instead? Email hello@onhand.store and we'll load your product list for you and have you live the same day. Either way you get your own address (something like yourcompany.onhand.store) and an admin sign-in.

Signing in

Your account has its own web address, and there are two ways in — both land on the same dashboard:

Your team

On Team, add the people who actually maintain the listing — sales, logistics, whoever. Give someone an email and password, or just a PIN, or both. Anyone on the team can update products; only admins can add or remove teammates. OnHand won't let you remove the last admin, so there's always someone who can get back in.

Your products

Each product has a code, a name and a pack size. Add one and it appears for every store already linked to you, and to any store browsing the directory for the first time. Removing a product from your list never deletes anything from a store's own records — their counting history stays intact.

Availability — the part stores actually feel

Every product sits in one of three states, and you change it whenever the situation changes:

Availability changes reach stores straight away — there's nothing to publish or confirm. Not orderable is the only setting anywhere in OnHand that stops an order going out, so it's worth using deliberately; back-orderable is the softer option that leaves the call with the store.

If a store does order something while it's back-orderable, that line stays flagged on their side until one of their team confirms the stock actually arrived — so a back-order can't quietly fall off anyone's radar.

Price and a photo, right on the product

Add an optional price to a product and stores see the value of an order as they build it. Add a photo — taken straight from a phone or tablet, or uploaded from a computer — and it shows as a small thumbnail everywhere that product appears on a store's dashboard.

Your dashboard at a glance

Your own dashboard opens on stat tiles — orders sent to you today, and how many of your products are Available, Backorderable, or Not orderable right now — so you can see the shape of things before scrolling into the detail.

Subscribed stores

The Subscribed stores tab lists every store that's added you, and a searchable history of every order they've actually sent — PO numbers, line items, quantities, notes. Search by store name or by anything in the order itself.

Feed

Post to your Feed — new season stock landing, a public holiday delivery change, seasonal hours — and it shows up automatically in the dashboard of every store that's added you, no group email or phone-around required. Anyone on your team can post; a photo is optional.

Printing your product list

A print icon on your dashboard produces a clean, printable version of your current product list — useful for a phone call, a delivery run, or handing to someone without dashboard access.

This is the real build history of OnHand — every entry below is something that actually shipped, on the date it shipped. Updated in the same batch of work as the feature itself, not after the fact.