Overview

Managing your Merchandise Plan and Open to Buy requires you to manage different components depending on where you are in the process.

For your In-Season Plans, you will look at recent trends and delivery shifts to determine a more accurate depiction on how the business is performing. This is when you can adjust your category penetrations as well to see how product mix shifts are impacting the overall business.

Your Pre-Season Plans are built on your current trend (and financial factors) prior to having any actuals, except for some on order based on lead times. Pre-Season lets you derive a plan for your team to assort to and buy against. Please refer to this article here for a walk-through on that workflow.

In-Season

When planning In Season, you will be planning based off of growth rate, monthly builds, discount rate, return rate, receipt movements and current inventory position.

In our Toolio - In-Season Planning view we have formatted the workflow to highlight where to focus and what to input.

Key:

Toolio - Format Key

Steps

Flow On Order to Receipts - Run this function to seed your Receipts with the On Order Actuals for the balance of the year. (article link here)
Generate Inventory - Select this function before you start your planning to see the impact of your sales and receipts shifts on the inventory.
Forecasting Sales
1. Using Gross Sales Retail - Build Plan you can re-trend your sales based on the latest actuals.
2. Enter in Gross Sales AIR, Total Allowances % (Total Allowances are the sum of your Discounts and Markdowns) and Gross Sales AUC to output your Gross Sales Units, Gross Sales Cost and Gross Sales Margin.
  OR
3. Run the Forecast function based on Sales History or Merchandise Plan Scenarios.
Update your Receipts Plan based on any Open to Buy you need to add. Inputs are Receipt Units, Receipts AIR and Receipts AUC.
Returns - Returns Rate Retail, Returns Rate Units, Returns AIR and Returns AUC are the inputs as well if you need to plan them.
Once you have completed these steps, you will need to review how your BOP AIR, BOP AUC line up with your Gross Sales AIR and Gross Sales AUC. This helps you identify if your sales and inventory is aligned.
Review your Net Sales (bottom line).

Table

Input (Metric)	Description	Output (Metric)
`Gross Sales Retail` `Build`	The sales growth expected month to month	`Gross Sales Retail`
`Gross Sales AIR`	The intended Retail Price	`Gross Sales Units`
`Total Allowances %`	The % off of the intended Retail Price at the point of sale.	`Total Allowances $` `Gross Sales AUR`
`Gross Sales AUC`	The Weighted Average of Costs of Goods Sold.	`Gross Sales Cost` `Gross Sales Margin` `Gross Sales Margin %`
`Receipts Units`	Quantity that is either already in the supply chain and/or the total amount of units needed to hit turn goals.
`Receipts AIR`	The intended Retail Price	`Receipts Ticket`
`Receipts AUC`	The Weighted Average Unit Cost.	`Receipts Cost`
`Returns Rate Retail`	The % of Retail $'s returned	`Returns Retail`
`Returns Rate Units`	The % of units returned against Gross Sales Units	`Returns Units`
`Returns AIR`	The original intended Retail Price of the items returned.	`Returns Ticket`
`Returns AUC`	The Unit Cost of the returned units	`Returns Cost`

Video

Here is a quick video on the In-Season workflow.

Common Planning Workflows in Toolio

Pre-Season Planning Workflow

Assortment Plan - Line Building

Wholesale Planning Workflow

Merchandise Plan - Workflow Views