Inventory Planner account settings

Customize warehouse settings, low-stock alerts, seasonality, connect to accounting systems and more.

Jansen avatar
Written by Jansen
Updated over a week ago

Adjusting your Inventory Planner account settings allows you to customize certain aspects of how your account works, ensuring it performs optimally for your business. This article will walk you through the available settings.

Access account settings by clicking on "Account" in the lower left corner, then "Settings".

Connections & warehouses

Use this tab to check your current platforms and add additional ones. Read more here about how to connect your store, including connecting more than one store.

Warehouses reflect locations where stock is kept. They are set up on your connected platform (sometimes as "locations"), and one platform may . Amazon connections will show FBA warehouses for each country within the region as well as a FBM warehouse across the region.

In this section you can enable or disable warehouses for replenishment and reporting purposes. If all warehouses are disabled, you will see a combined view of all warehouses. If you would like to set up combined warehouses, click here for step-by-step instructions and considerations.

General

Under the "General" tab, you can set basic information about your account:

  • Company name

  • Country

  • Date format

  • Currency

    • Used as the default currency for combined warehouses and other aggregated reports

  • Time zone

    • Affects reports that segment by day

Forecast

The Forecast tab contains account-wide settings which affect the sales forecast and related analytics.

General

Use stockouts history

Inventory Planner automatically detects when a product is out of stock starting from the moment you connect your store to Inventory Planner. Looking at stockouts helps to estimate the demand correctly. For example, if you sell 10 units of Variant A per month on average but the product is out of stock for 1/2 of a month, the real demand for it is 20 units. Without taking stockouts into account, the forecasted demand could be too low.

By default, your account is set to take stockouts into account. However, if your store allows overselling (sales of an item even when it is out of stock), then you should change this setting to disregard out-of-stock information.

Default forecasting method

Choose the forecasting method used by all items in your account by default, unless the variant uses a custom forecast setting.

Apply seasonal increase for non-seasonal products for Black Friday and Christmas

When this option is checked, Inventory Planners will take holiday sales seasons (including Black Friday and Cyber Monday) into account, even for items that are non-seasonal.

Inventory Planner checks the previous year's sales in the months of November and December and any detected increases are automatically factored in to your future forecast for these times.

Read more about forecasting for the holiday season here.

Use gross sales

Check this box to ignore returns when generating a forecast.

Default replenishment

Set the default replenishment recommendation for items with zero stock and no sales history.

Note that this setting only applies to items with zero stock and no sales history. The setting is intended to be used for newly listed item awaiting an initial order of inventory. Once an item either has stock or sales history, the default replenishment will not apply.

Default min safety stock

Set the number of units added to the calculated replenishment recommendation.

For example, if Inventory Planner calculates 5 units are needed of an item and the default minimum stock is set to 10 units, the new replenishment recommendation will be 15 units.

For better recommendations and stock control, Inventory Planner recommends adding to the days of stock instead of using a default min stock level. Adding to days of stock ensures that the buffer amount of stock is relative to the sales velocity for each item. Read more about why it is better to use Days of Stock rather than Min Stock here.

Default lead time

Set the default lead time (in days) for new variants.

Default days of stock

Set the default days of stock for new variants.

Default assembly time

Set the default assembly time (in days) for new assemblies.

Default assembly cycle

Set the default assembly cycle (in days) for new assemblies.

The average value of VAT

If your retail prices include VAT, your forecasted revenue will be calculated including VAT. You can enter the average VAT percentage value here to generate forecasts excluding VAT.

Excluded sales

For non-seasonal forecasting methods (Recent Sales & Trends and Last Sales), it can be helpful to exclude certain periods of unusual sales from the forecast calculation. For example, by excluding Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the forecast the following weeks and months will not be overstated following a spike in sales.

Alerts

Inventory Planner lets you set low stock alerts to inform you when you're running out of stock.

You can configure the frequency and what information you receive, as well as customize the alerts by SKU.

You can also send alerts to multiple email addresses at once, ensuring everyone who needs to be alerted receives the relevant information.

Low stock alerts

Enable or disable alerts in the "Low stock alerts" section.

If the notify in advance setting is enabled, Inventory Planner will send you an email on the replenish date of your variant, based on the variant's lead time, so you can order stock before you run out.

When enabled, delta alerts will only notify you on the first date that an item reaches its replenish date. If the variant is not ordered that day, it will not be included in future notifications.

You can stop alerts for variants whose stock is below zero by checking the box to "exclude variants with negative stock". This setting is useful if you allow backorders or preorders.

You can also choose whether or not to exclude hidden variants from low stock alerts.

ABC Class or “A” Class, “B” Class, “C” Class

Classes are categories of your inventory. By default, “A” Class includes SKUs comprising the top 80% of revenue, “B” Class is the next 15%, and “C” Class is the final 5%. You can use this section to change the percentage each section represents.

By default, Inventory Planner calculates classes based on revenue within the last 30 days of sales, but you can modify the date range using the "ABC metric" option.

You can also configure your settings to segment the classes based on the number of units sold and lifetime sales instead, by checking the "ABC analysis by units sold" checkbox.

Purchase orders

The purchase order settings allow you to set the following:

  • Purchase order numbering

  • Shop name and logo

  • Purchase order email layout

  • Any connected accounting platforms

  • Custom fields

Wholesale

Choose whether to enable the Wholesale functionality, allowing you to separate wholesale orders from your regular demand. Replenishment recommendations will add wholesale needs on top of regular demand. Learn more about wholesale planning here.

API

The Inventory Planner API provides realtime access to data in your Inventory Planner account and is intended to be used by developers.

Please note that the API is currently in beta and subject to change.

Authorization

To access Inventory Planner API, first you need an API authorization key. The key is associated with user. To obtain the key:

  • Use Generate key to generate API key

  • Save generated key

Use 'Delete key' if you would like to remove the key.

To authorize using API key, add the following two headers to HTTP requests:

Authorization: <API_key>
Account: <account_id>

Note that you can also access the API from the browser using existing Inventory Planner session. This may be useful for making manual requests with browser.

Users

You can add users and customize permissions in Settings > Users.

To add a new user, click Invite user:

Enter their email address and set their permissions by unchecking the "Full access" box.

Then click "Invite user".

To edit permissions of an existing user, click the edit icon beside their name, then uncheck the "Full access" box:

To delete a user, click on the trash can icon next to the user's name. They will no longer be able to log into Inventory Planner, but their name and email address will be maintained on historic records.

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