The Rotation You Could Not Switch Off

Rotation policy is normally a configuration question. For a long time ours was not a question at all. Every path that took stock out of a location sorted the available batches by expiry date, oldest first, and nothing anywhere changed it — not even the field on the item that said it would.

How it actually works

On an item set to earliest expiry first, every allocation orders the candidate batches by expiry date, treating a missing date as the far future. That single rule produces the behaviour you want in all three cases without any special handling: dated batches rotate properly, undated batches are consumed only when nothing dated is available, and a mixture behaves sensibly rather than arbitrarily.

On an item set to earliest received first, the same paths order by when the stock arrived — the batch's received date, falling back to when the batch was recorded, falling back to when the stock row was created. Issues, till sales, transfers, and allocations from one warehouse or one location all read the same setting, so there is one rotation per item rather than one per screen.

The allocations are recorded, so a batch's history shows what was taken from it and when. That is what makes a recall traceable one step forward, which is the half of traceability that is usually missing.

The column that looked like a setting

There was a rotation-policy column on the item record. It was written by nothing, read by nothing, and exposed in no screen — it existed in a migration and in two internal registries and nowhere else.

We published that because a dead column is a specific kind of hazard. Found through an export, or by a developer looking at the schema, it read as a per-item rotation policy that somebody had left unset. It was not. Setting it would have accomplished nothing.

On 1 October 2026 we wired it rather than deleting it. It now appears on the item form as Stock rotation, it is read by every allocation path, and because it decides which physical stock leaves the shelf next it is one of the critical fields a change to which waits for approval.

The rotation used to be stricter than the schema suggested. That is the opposite of the usual error, and it was still an error.

It was one of five fields of that shape we published — alongside a bin capacity that enforced nothing, a count-plan frequency that scheduled nothing, approval value thresholds that route nothing, and a pick sequence that sorts nothing. The first two were wired on the same day as this one; the last two are still open. The pattern is worth carrying into any evaluation, of any product: a field you can see is not evidence of a behaviour you can rely on.

When you would legitimately want something other than the default

Rarely, and it is worth being honest about the cases rather than pretending there are none. Only one of them is answered by the new setting.

• Non-perishables where expiry means something else. A date used as a manufacture reference rather than a use-by used to drive the rotation anyway, because the field is the field. This is the case the setting answers: set the item to earliest received first.
• A customer specifies a minimum remaining shelf life. A retailer refusing anything with less than two-thirds of its life left means the oldest batch is precisely the one you cannot send them. A rotation setting does not help here; you allocate to that order by picking the batch or by moving stock.
• A batch is quarantined but not expired. Held stock is excluded from allocation, which handles this correctly — but only if somebody has actually placed the hold. The rotation rule will happily allocate a batch nobody has flagged.
• A promotional or contract batch bought for one customer. Confirming that customer's sales order reserves the quantity at the warehouse, so nobody else can sell it. The reservation holds a number rather than a batch, though, and rotation still decides which batch leaves against whichever order is filled first.

The last three share a shape: the rule is right about shelf life and knows commitments only as quantities. Where a commitment is to one particular batch, the resolution is still physical — an explicit batch or a separate location — rather than a policy switch.

Why Irish food and drink distribution is the right place to write this

Because it is a sector where remaining shelf life is a contractual term rather than a preference, and where the customer base is concentrated enough that a single retailer's specification shapes how you have to hold stock.

In that setting the default rotation rule is mostly a gift — it is the behaviour you would have configured anyway, applied consistently by something that never gets tired at four in the afternoon. The new setting matters for the packaging, dry goods and spares on the same shelves. And the exception that matters most, when it comes, is not a rotation exception at all. It is a segregation problem, and the answer is a location.

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