An automatic forecast based on historical sales and is recomputed by Inventory Planner every day. Sometimes it makes sense to manually override the automatic forecast to more closely align it with your plans. It can be especially useful in the following situations:
You are planning a marketing campaign or other changes to your business and projections based only on past sales are not reliable enough.
You are planning purchases and would like to review the forecast first and fix it. Once the forecast has been fixed for a period, it stops recomputing every day. This allows you to postpone creation of purchase orders
You are receiving new products and would like to manually enter the initial demand for them.
To apply Open-to-Buy planning information at a category level for replenishment purposes.
Edit Forecast Screen
You can edit the forecast in three ways:
Directly on the Edit Forecast screen to change units forecast to be sold, forecast revenue, or change the forecast by a percentage. Note this can include category overrides based on Open-to-Buy (OTB) information.
Using Bulk Actions to increase the forecast by a percentage
By importing a forecast override to change units forecast to be sold, revenue, or change the forecast by a percentage
Change forecast on Edit Forecast page
Use the Edit Forecast screen to modify the forecast by units sold (forecast sales), forecast revenue, or a percentage increase.
You can also specify the forecast percentage increase which is applied for the forecast override (if set) or for the automated forecast. The final result is shown in 'Total Forecast'.
If you use Open-to-Buy planning, you can use bulk actions on the Edit Forecast screen to apply overrides at the category level.
Bulk changes to forecast percentage
To make changes in bulk, select some products using checkboxes on the left.
Then use the Bulk Actions menu. It allows you to apply same action to a group of products including settings or adjusting forecast settings, setting a low stock alert, recomputing the forecast, and editing or clearing the forecast override.
Forecast Override options allow you to check and review the aggregated forecast for products, categories, vendors, and the entire store. This forecast can be overwritten and reconciled with variants. Enter your forecast override in units or revenue then save changes to update the forecast override for variants from the aggregated forecast using automatic forecast distribution.
For example you have two products in a category. The automatic forecast for these products is 10 and 20 units for December. The bottom-up forecast for the category is 30 units (10 + 20). When you override the top-level forecast to 60 (+100%) and save changes to variants it makes it 20 and 40 respectively.
Replenishment Screen
Forecasts can also be edited in the Replenishment screen by clicking the icon under Details for any item, then clicking the Replenishment & Edit Forecast tab.
To make changes in bulk, select some products using checkboxes on the left.
Then use the Bulk Actions menu. It allows to apply same action to a group of products:
recompute the forecast calculation
clear a forecast override
add/remove the percentage increase
set custom forecast settings including seasonality and consideration of stockouts when calculating the forecast
Importing Forecast Overrides
Create a spreadsheet with the following information in 3 total columns, including a column title for each:
SKU or other identifier such as Title, ID (used by your sales platform), Inventory Planner ID, Vendor Reference, or Barcode.
Month you are overriding the forecast using 'mm/yyyy' format, for example 01/2021 in one row, 02/2021 in another row, etc.
Forecast Override for that month.
Example:
Please note: Only complete 1 of the Override columns with data for each row.
Example: Do not apply a Unit, Revenue and % override for 1 row.
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To import forecast overrides select Import > Forecast Override, from the Replenishment report.
Click the option to Select File or Drag the spreadsheet you've created with forecast overrides.
We also offer the ability to download a CSV Template for this upload
Once the file is uploaded, use the option to "Map Columns", to proceed.
In the import file mapping screen, be sure to select the correct identifier. SKU will be the identifier used by default.
When all fields are matched to the corresponding field in Inventory Planner, select Import to complete the import process.
