Caravan

Getting started

Five steps from an empty account to an agent that reviews your inventory and tells you what to do next. About twenty minutes by hand, and you can see it working in the first two.

  1. 1See it working before you type anything

    Sign up, then use "Explore with sample data" on the dashboard. It loads three suppliers with deliberately mixed delivery records, five products, stock levels with real shortfalls, and six months of order history.

    That last part matters: Quartermaster needs history to say anything useful, and an empty account gives it nothing to reason about. Sample data is the difference between an agent that looks broken and one you can judge.

    Every sample record is labelled. Clearing it removes all of it in one click and leaves anything you added yourself untouched, so there is no cleanup to dread.

    Do this: Load the sample data, start a review from the dashboard's Getting started steps, read what it proposes, then clear it when you're ready to use your own.

  2. 2Bring in your products and suppliers

    A supplier needs a name and a typical lead time. The lead time is not decoration — it is one of the two inputs to every reorder decision, so a guess here becomes a wrong answer later. Use what you actually see, not what the contract promises.

    A product needs a SKU and a name, and must be linked to the supplier you buy it from: the agent can't propose reordering a product with nobody to order it from. Warehouses are where you hold stock; if you have one location, one warehouse is enough. If you already have this in a spreadsheet, import it as CSV instead of typing it. The importer shows you the mapping it inferred and what it will do with each row before anything is written.

    Coming from Stocky? Import its purchase-order CSV files instead of typing suppliers in. They bring your orders, your suppliers (each with a lead time measured from your real deliveries) and what each product cost, and they don’t change your stock on hand. Add a warehouse first: the delivery history is recorded against one. Switching from Stocky has the steps.

    Do this: Add (or import) at least one supplier, one product linked to it, and one warehouse.

  3. 3Tell it what you hold and what you use

    Stock levels say what you have on hand right now, per product per warehouse. Demand records say how much you sold or used over a period. Neither has to be perfect, but the second one is what turns guesswork into arithmetic. Import them as CSV (a sales export with a date, SKU and quantity per row works as it is) or type in a few recent periods.

    With demand history and a lead time, Quartermaster computes a reorder point the standard way: expected demand over the lead time, plus safety stock sized to the variability of that demand and the service level you asked for. Nothing is rounded down, because you cannot order 4.3 gaskets and rounding down is the direction that causes a stockout.

    You can see the whole calculation for any product, line by line. If you disagree with a proposal, that is the page that shows you why it said what it said.

    Do this: Set stock levels for your products, and record what you sold or used over a few recent periods.

  4. 4Ask for a review, and read the Action Queue

    Quartermaster reviews your operation when you ask, and proposes what it thinks should happen next: reorder this before it runs out, this supplier is slipping, this shipment is going to be late. Scheduled reviews are off until you turn them on, so start the first one yourself, from the dashboard's Getting started steps or with "Run Quartermaster now" in the Action Queue.

    Every proposal arrives in the Action Queue with its reasoning attached and nothing done yet. Approving it is what makes it real; rejecting it discards it entirely. Approving a reorder creates a draft purchase order, which you send yourself. This is the whole product in one sentence: it proposes, you decide.

    There is no tool Quartermaster can call that places an order, sends a message, or changes stock directly. That is a property of how it is built, not a policy it has been asked to follow.

    Do this: Start a review, read one proposal's reasoning, and approve or reject it.

  5. 5Put it on a schedule, if you want one

    In Settings, choose how often it should review on its own. That cadence is yours; the deployment's own tick is an upper bound on how often any organization can be reviewed.

    Every review counts against your plan's review allowance, scheduled ones included. A trial has 25 in total and reviews at most once a day, which lasts the whole 14-day trial. A scheduled review that finds nothing changed since the last one is skipped and doesn't count. The setting shows how long your allowance lasts at the cadence you pick, before you save it.

    The dashboard tells you plainly when scheduled reviews are off or aren't running — a stalled schedule shows as stalled rather than as a quiet, empty queue. An empty Action Queue is only reassuring if you know something looked and found nothing.

    Do this: Choose a review cadence in Settings that your allowance can sustain.

Approvals, and what stops a bad one

The approval gate is the product. These are the controls layered on top of it, all of which you configure.

  • Spending above a threshold you set requires two different people. The person who approves first cannot also confirm.
  • Auto-approval is off by default. Switched on, it is bounded by an amount cap, a minimum supplier on-time rate, and a probation window that excludes suppliers without a real track record. Any supplier can be excluded outright.
  • The exact wording of every email and agreement is shown to you before approval, and that wording is what is sent. A call is different: you approve its purpose and the script the voice assistant is given. Every call opens with a fixed line that says the caller is an AI and that the call is recorded and transcribed, and the assistant then speaks live, so its words after that are not fixed in advance. The recording and transcript show what was said.
  • Every approval and rejection is written to an append-only audit log that records who did it and when, and distinguishes a person's action from the agent's.

Who on your team can do what

  • Admin — full access, including settings, billing and team.
  • Approver — can approve or reject in the Action Queue and see everything, but can't edit suppliers or change settings.
  • Member — day-to-day work, no approvals.
  • Auditor — read-only everywhere. For people who need visibility without the ability to change anything.

When you're ready for more

None of this is needed on day one. It's here so you know what the product grows into.

  • Requests for Quote — invite several suppliers to bid on the same requirement, compare what comes back, and award it into a purchase order.
  • Negotiations — set a ceiling and let your agent negotiate against the supplier's agent, which holds a floor you never see. Both mandates in place means it runs on its own; the agreement comes back to you for approval.
  • Discover — publish what you supply and find other organizations on the platform. Off by default, and a counterparty met this way is added with auto-approval blocked.
  • The supplier portal — your suppliers get a scoped, expiring link showing only their own orders, quotes and agreements. They never get an account inside your organization.

If nothing seems to be happening

  • Scheduled reviews are off until you choose a cadence in Settings, so nothing reviews on its own until then.
  • No proposals at all usually means no demand history — Quartermaster won't invent a reorder it can't justify from data.
  • A product with no supplier can't be reordered: there is nobody to send the order to.
  • A supplier with no lead time and a product with no stock level give it nothing to compare, so it stays quiet rather than guessing.
  • Check the dashboard for the agent's status: it says when it last reviewed, how many reviews and proposals there have been, and whether the schedule has stalled.
  • Agent Activity retains every review in full — what it examined, what it concluded, what it proposed — including the ones that proposed nothing.

The one thing worth remembering

Quartermaster never acts on its own. Everything it produces waits for a person, and the few paths that can execute unattended are ones you switch on deliberately and bound yourself. If you want the full account of what it can and cannot do, read Security & control.