The Forecasting function in Toolio's Item Planning module streamlines the sales projection process at the item level. With the Like for Like selection you can base seasonality trends on other items or attributes.

As business grows and shifts happen in product mix you will inevitably have newer items start to perform as key drivers. You will want to forecast your demand using other items that had more history and have some commonalities. By using Like for Like you can pick attributes or items in other categories that the new items may mimic in terms of performance.

I have a new Men's T-Shirt in Charcoal that has been performing really strong over the past 8 weeks, but I don't have history from last year to generate a forecast from. I also don't want to use my Merchandise Plan at the class level to drive the seasonality because it is too generic for this style. I want to either use the seasonality I have in my Men's T-Shirt in Grey Heather and Black combined, or use my Boy's T-Shirt in Charcoal that I have had 2 years of history on.

This is exactly where Like for Like will come in handy. I am able to choose other colors or even other divisions to help drive my forecast.

Please see the walkthrough of using the forecasting feature in Item Plan to understand how to navigate to the forecast menu here.

1. Using the filter, group, and sort functions, you can easily configure the view to display the products you are interested in forecasting.

2. By clicking on any of the checkboxes, you can select the item(s) you would like to forecast. You can then right click and select the Forecast feature which will take you to the Forecast menu.

Please note that you can select and forecast multiple items at once. This may be particularly useful if you want to forecast your products bulk.

3. Now that the Forecast menu is open, you will see the number of items selected, the time frame selected to forecast and the scenario to forecast to. Below that the Forecast Profile can be set to Use Defaults or Override Defaults. Please read more about Forecast Profiles here. To see the full menu select Override Defaults.

4. Check the Like for Like box. From here your will notice that the Season Groups dropdown changed to a Filter.

5. Select your filters that you want to base your seasonality on.

6. Please select Sales History as your Seasonality Method then proceed to select your Plan Year and Rolling Average.

7. Chose the Volume Method and click Forecast.

The above steps are great when you want to use the history of an item to base your forecast off of but we also can use the forecast of the Like for Like to generate it.

Follow all the above steps up until step 6.

6b. Select Item Plan as your Seasonality Method then proceed to select your Plan Year and Scenario.

7b. Chose the Volume Method.

8b. Click Forecast.

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