Open-to-Buy planning is designed as a cash flow planning tool.
By inputting planned revenue goals and forward stock cover goals for each month, Inventory Planner can suggest how much stock should be purchased beyond stock that’s already been received or that’s scheduled to arrive on purchase orders.
Your OTB plan, once generated, can be used to influence your forecast or be used in the creation of purchase orders.
Configuring the forecast to use OTB calculations
Forecasting predicts future sales and drive replenishment recommendations. The forecast is highly customizable, and you can learn more about configuring it here. OTB provides another tool to configure your forecast.
To configure the forecast to use OTB calculations, go into the Edit Forecast screen and select “Categories”. Then select the categories to override using the checkboxes on the left-hand side.
Once the categories are selected, click Bulk Actions at the bottom of the screen and select “Seed revenue from Open-to-Buy plan”. A modal window will then open where you can select an OTB plan using the drop-down menu.
Click “Apply” to apply the override.
Purchase orders and the OTB report
Since an OTB plan is a cash flow planning tool, it can be used when creating purchase orders. Aside from providing guidance on how many units to buy, the OTB at cost recommendations can be used to scale a purchase order’s budget up or down.
To do so, click Actions > Scale to Budget. You can then enter in a new subtotal for the purchase order based on your OTB recommendations.
It is also important to remember that purchase orders will feed back into your OTB plan.
The Expected Date on a purchase order determines which month the “Purchases” metric will increase for in Open-to-Buy.
As purchase orders are created, you can return to Open-to-Buy any time to reconcile new purchases with your existing OTB plan. The OTB figure will reduce as new purchase orders are created and received.