Inventory Planner Essentials provides a continuous workflow from forecasting into purchasing for specific tasks you will have, based on industry best practices.

Continue reading to learn how the forecast and purchase views can help you save time in your day, and when and how to use these.

If you want to get deeper into improving your forecasting or purchasing, check out these best practice guides:

Inventory Planner Essentials is designed to help you optimize your ROI while minimizing both stockouts and overstock. In the Forecast and Purchase screens there are views that target these goals for you.

Aim to check the Stockout risks view in Purchase screen daily, to stay on top of quickly trending variants. You can also set up low stock alerts to automate notifications directly to your inbox. Learn more about low stock alerts here.

Once you’ve set up your forecasts for variants, you should check back monthly, especially for Bestsellers, to make sure these are still accurate to your plans. Newly-launched variants will usually need checking more often - weekly or daily if they are trending fast - using the New launches view in forecast.

The All replenishable view lists all of your variants for which a forecast and purchase order can be created.

This is the broadest view, designed to display all variants you may want to consider when placing a purchase order. It’s sorted by "Requirement profit" by default, listing your variants in order of how much profit the quantity of units to reorder to meet demand will net.

The Stockout risk view displays all variants that must be purchased in the next 7 days to avoid a stockout, sorted by urgency.

Because newly-launched variants can be volatile, they are excluded from this view to avoid skewing the forecast.

Use this view in Forecast to prioritize checking these variants’ forecast sales against their sales histories. You can also make adjustments or change their lookback periods to refine their forecasts, thereby making sure their purchase recommendations are as accurate as possible.

In the Purchase screen, use this view to work through a prioritized list of variants and decide which ones to order. "Requirement profit" data can tell you which ones may be best from a budgetary perspective. Once you’ve decided, filter by vendor and select the variants you want to order to create a purchase order.

The Bestsellers view displays the variants that make up the top 80% of your revenue, based on ABC analysis and sorted by total sales.

Because newly-launched variants can be volatile, they are excluded from this view to avoid skewing the forecast.

Use this view in Forecast to monitor and prioritize your highest-value variants, so you can avoid stockouts and maximize revenue.

In the Purchase screen, use this view to work through your highest-value variants as a priority and place purchase orders for them. If you have limited budget, it is usually best to prioritize keeping higher-value variants in stock.

This view uses ABC class analysis to calculate which variants contribute the most revenue as a percentage of your total revenue, which means your bestselling variants are worked out compared against one another instead of using a revenue figure without context.

The Recently added view displays all new variants synced from Shopify, sorted by the most recent. This view includes draft products, which haven’t yet been published in Shopify and won’t have a sales history, as well as variants added after a product has already been published (e.g. expanding a size range).

Note that if a product is created and launches within 30 days, there may be some overlap with the “New launches” view.

Use this view in Forecast to see which variants have been recently synced from Shopify, and work through them to make sure they’re set up correctly.

In the Purchase screen, use this view to find new variants and place their first PO.

The New launches view displays all variants which have been launched in Shopify within the last month, sorted by most recently published. This view displays new variants that either don’t yet have a sales history, or have a very minimal sales history, making their behavior hard to predict. They may also need their vendor and vendor attributes to be set.

Note that if a product was created and launched within the last 30 days, there may be some overlap with the “Recently added” view.

Use this view in Forecast to monitor your new variants when forecasting is most unpredictable. The instability of a newly-launched variant’s forecast may cause noise in other reports, so this view acts as a place where they can be handled and monitored until they’ve matured and their forecast has stabilized.

In the Purchase screen, use this view to place purchase orders for your new launches, separate to those of your more established products.