Reviewing Your Synced Data

Below are a few important data review steps to take now to make sure your demand is being forecasted accurately in the future.

Inactive Items:

All SKUs (and suppliers for QuickBooks) are synced from the past 4 years in your data source, which means there is the potential for inactive items to appear in your ForecastRx account. Please check your Suppliers and Items pages for unwanted items and hide them if you do not want them forecasted. For more information on how to hide items, click here.

Duplicate Items:

You may come across duplicate products in your Items list and this may occur for multiple reasons.

• Duplicate ASINs: If a product is sold via FBA and FBM, there will be 2 items listed in ForecastRx, one for FBA and one for FBM, sales and inventory data. If you would like to combine the data so these items are forecasted together, please set up a Purchase As on the FBM item. For more information on how to set up a Purchase As, click here.
• New Identifier for an existing product: If you switch to a new SKU or ASIN when selling a new version of a product, such as a new and improved model, or an issue arises with a product listing forcing you to create a new one, you will need to set up a Purchase As on the old item to combine the sales data and remaining inventory. For more information on how to set up a Purchase As, click here. 
• An item is duplicated by mistake: First, check your data source and rectify the issue if it is the cause, then initiate a sync with ForecastRx to update the data. If the duplicates do not originate in your data source, please contact ForecastRx support. 

Open Purchase Orders:

If you are a QuickBooks-integrated user, navigate to Manage Company > Supply to view your open purchase orders. This data is synced directly from QuickBooks and should reflect the same quantities as your QuickBooks file. If the data is not correct, please update it in QuickBooks if applicable and run a sync. If the data in QuickBooks still does not match up with ForecastRx, please contact ForecastRx support. 

Initial Sync Date:

It is important to sync as much data as possible with ForecastRx to get a more accurate forecast. To check if you have synced 4 years of data, please check the earliest sale date shown in Manage Company > Demand to make sure it goes back 4 years or to your first recorded sale date. You can also verify this by checking the Item Card Forecast Data to see if the sales history matches up with your records. If your sales history looks incorrect or not synced back 4 years, please contact ForecastRx support. 

Forecasted Sales:

Items need to have at least 1 full month of sales history to be forecasted and the forecast models perform better at identifying sales trends and seasonality when a product has 2 full years of sales history. 

If any of your products do not have at least 2 years of history or have recent or multiple stockouts, you may want to modify your sales history to adjust the data for better forecasts. To learn how to do this, click here. 
If you would prefer to rely on daily sales rates for purchasing and restocking recommendations rather than the forecast recommendations, check that your daily sales rate weights are set to the time periods you would like to focus on. For more information on setting daily sales rates, click here for QuickBooks users, and click here for Amazon users. 

Safety Stock (Service Level):

Verify that your safety stock level is where you would like it to be if you are using the forecasted purchasing recommendations. In the initial sync, the Service Level was set on the Company Details page. To check your safety stock recommendations based on your Service Level, navigate to Purchasing > Custom to view all items, and select the Item Card icon to view the safety stock, or view the Recommended Safety Stock column in the grid, and compare that to the item's projected sales.

Safety stock and projected sales are shown for the sales horizon(lead time + Order Interval) as a whole. For example, if your sales horizon is 90 days, the projected sales and recommended safety stock are for the upcoming 90-day period.

If the safety stock seems too high or too low, adjust your service level accordingly. If safety stock is too high or low across all items, adjust the Company Details Service Level. If the safety stock is too high or low for specific suppliers or items, adjust it for the individual suppliers or items. 

If you would like to schedule a meeting with a member of our team—let us know, we are here to help!