Inventory Planer Essentials is navigated using the top menu bar. Each link on the menu will take you to a specific screen. Each screen has a specific area of focus to align with one step of your operational process, and together they provide an end-to-end workflow for planning and reordering inventory.
Screens
Forecast
The Forecast screen lists your variants and calculates how much they’re likely to sell in future months based on their past sales. You can choose how much of their sales history to take into account and adjust the forecast as a percentage if any other factors need to be considered.
The Forecast screen will be consulted on a regular basis, probably about once a month. You may want to consult it more frequently during new launches or if you have products with particularly volatile sales.
Purchase
The Purchase screen calculates how many units of each variant you need to order, and when, to meet the demand forecasted in the previous screen. Here you can create purchase orders.
The Purchase screen will be accessed more frequently, likely daily, to check whether new purchase orders need to be placed.
Purchase orders (POs)
Once you’ve created a purchase order, you can use the POs screen to manage it. This screen lists your existing purchase orders, allowing you to edit them, view upcoming deliveries and receive inventory as it arrives.
The POs screen will be accessed frequently, depending on your purchasing schedule.
Variants
The Variants screen lists all of the variants in the system, along with their attributes. On this screen you can see what details have been synced from Shopify, as well as configure some Inventory Planner fields such as the lead time, days of stock and whether or not the variant should be considered replenishable.
The Variants screen is used whenever you launch new variants, or if existing variants change.
Vendors
The Vendor screen lists your vendors and lets you both configure their vendor details and view the variants they’re assigned to and configure those specific vendor attributes.
The Vendors screen is used whenever you buy from a new vendor, or if existing vendors change.
Account
The Account screen provides information about your Inventory Planner Essentials subscription, as well as letting you configure your users and some global settings such as an order counter and alert frequency.
Help
The final option on the navigation menu will expand or collapse the Engage panel, which provides more information about the page you're on, complete with links to Inventory Planner Essential’s help center, where you can learn more about the system. If additional help is needed, you can contact Inventory Planner’s support team. Learn more about contacting the Support team here.
Views, filters, sorting and searching
Screens in Inventory Planner Essentials come with preconfigured settings called views, as well as tools that allow you to customize the view further.
Views provide a focused selection of items, using preset filtering and sorting rules. They’re based on industry best practices and are aligned to workflow-oriented tasks you may want to focus on, such as keeping bestsellers in stock, resolving under-MOQ issues on a PO, or resolving missing vendors on variants.
Filters allow you to further focus a view, such as filtering purchase recommendations down to a specific vendor or looking at a specific brand when forecasting. Filters make it easy to edit your data in bulk.
Sorting allows users to re-order the rows using one of the columns in the report.
Note that the default views include sorting rules based on data values that may not be visible in the table. If a filter or column sorting has been changed when using a view, it can be reset using the "Reset current view" button.
Search allows you to filter the records within the view or screen by variables like name, SKU or vendor name.
On the Forecast and Purchase screens, views, filters and searches are maintained between screens to enable a continuous workflow.