Inventory System – Forecast Feature – Reports

Hello and thank you for joining me for this Training Video. Today we will be covering how to generate new Forecasting Reports for our Inventory System

We are going to start off here in the Reports Section. There are two types of Forecasts, those that are based on Receive history and those that are based on Issue history. For each type there are two methods for Calculating the Forecast; Straight Line with Factor, and Moving Average.

To create a new Forecast press the ‘Add New’ button at the bottom of the list. The first thing is to give the forecast a Name. Step one will unlock after the name is input. Here we will decide whether this forecast will be based on Receiving or Issuing History. Both will permit the creator to select specific SKUs to track or to look at all Items. Receiving based selections will be based on which Vendors or Suppliers the items are received from. The Issuing modifiers are for selecting which Customers to include in the calculations and taking returns into account.

The two methods will have different options for Step 2, so let’s look at Moving Average first. With Moving Average selected, we can choose Interval and Start forecast options. The ‘Interval’ is how many months of History to look at for the Average. As with all Forecasting systems, the more history available the more accurate the forecast will be. The ‘Start Forecast on’ options permits the creator to dictate when the forecast will start Calculating.

The Second Option ‘Straight Line with Factor’ is designed to incorporate growth and slow-downs more directly. In step two for this option, we will choose to either have the system calculate the growth factor while telling the system how much history to look at, or the creator can tell the system how much growth or decline is expected and the system will automatically use all available history.

Step 3 will remain consistent regardless of the previous choices. Here the creator is able to account for Overages and Shrink in addition to choosing a Replenishment percent. The Replenish number relates to how much of the recommended quantity will be ordered.

Finally, we have a spot for general notes. So let’s save and close.

Back on the reports screen, we are going to click on the ‘Custom’ Section of Forecast. We will find the Forecast we just created and we just need to click it to run. We can also click on the star to add it to the ‘Favorites’ list. When viewing, there will be options to filter out the historical data and only see the forecasted data. There are also options to view as a graph and export it to Excel. Thank you again for joining me today, hope to see you in future videos.