Best Practices for Setting Up Your Items, Suppliers, Purchase Orders, and Demand

Let's take a look at the Manage Company Button

Company Details: these settings become your global defaults for items in your catalog that do not have their own set item or supplier-level ordering parameters.

Lead Time: is how long it takes (in days) for an item to become saleable from the time you place the purchase order. This includes all assembly, manufacturing, and shipping.

Order Interval: the amount of time (in days) between purchase orders.
Service Level: is the percent chance you want to have of not going out of stock. For example, a 50% SL would recommend replenishment based solely on our demand projection with no added safety stock cushion. Service Levels can range from 50-99%, but be aware, the higher the SL, the higher the amount of safety stock we are going to suggest. We recommend setting SL at a minimum of 70% initially.

By default, ForecastRx will send you confirmation emails to let you know when data Syncs and Forecasts have completed processing. If you’d prefer not to receive these emails, simply toggle these options off in your Company Details.

Take A Closer Look

Items

Your Items are active SKUs you have stored in your data source. ForecastRx pulls in active SKUs, and this can include SKUs that are no longer in use but are still active in your data source. If you ever want to sync previously inactive items in the future, reactivate them in your data source and we’ll be sure to grab them during the next scheduled sync. Each item can carry its own ordering parameters, which will trump any Company or Supplier settings you may have applied including Lead Time and Service Level.

Additional fields we recommend you fill out in Items:

• Supplier and Supplier Price: Enter this data so that your purchasing recommendations can be quantified monetarily to the highest degree of accuracy and sorted per supplier
• MOQ & Case Pack Qty: If applicable, enter these fields so your purchasing recommendations and restock recommendations are rounded up according to these parameters. 
• Warehouse Qty (Amazon Users): If you store inventory outside of Amazon, we recommend filling in your warehouse stock to provide accurate reorder recommendations and know how much inventory is available to restock FBA.
• Box Weights and Dimensions (Amazon Users): If you are using RestockAMZ to create Amazon shipments we recommend populating your standard box weights and dimensions so they will be prepopulated into your shipment file for all future shipments. 
• On Hand Qty Min: Adding a minimum in-stock quantity will make sure your purchasing recommendations reflect a reorder date and quantity for stock to arrive before going below the On Hand Qty Min. 
• Purchase As: If you have multiple SKUs for the same product (ex. a new version of an existing item, or Amazon FBA and FBM SKUs) you will want to use Purchase As to link the two products' sales and inventory together to get one purchasing recommendation and forecast. 

Take A Closer Look

Suppliers

Suppliers are the companies you purchase your items from. Each supplier can carry their own ordering parameters which would trump any Company settings you may have applied, including Lead Time and Service Level. 

QuickBooks Users: Your list of vendors should be pulled from your QuickBooks company file directly. However, we suggest using ForecastRx to apply specific settings (lead time, order interval, MOQ) that will improve the accuracy of your forecasts and purchasing recommendations.

All Other Users: You will use a pre-formatted CSV template to import data for the list of Suppliers you procure your items from. Once imported you will be presented with the results in a management grid and have the opportunity to configure optional settings (lead time, order interval, MOQ) that will improve your forecasts and purchase recommendations. If you are an Amazon user, Suppliers will populate with locations you have used to send recent FBA shipments.  

Take A Closer Look

Demand

For QuickBooks and Amazon users, we don’t advise modifying individual demand records in ForecastRx, unless you are hiding demand due to removal orders and special orders. We pull these records directly from your data source with each sync.

To modify demand for specific periods to account for stock-outs, promotions, or other anomalies, you will have the opportunity to do so in our Manage > Advanced > Modify Item History features.

Take A Closer Look

Purchase Orders (Previously Supply)

Purchase Orders are updated automatically for QuickBooks-integrated users, but all other users must manually import and update Purchase Orders if using ForecastRx for purchasing recommendations. QuickBooks users can Hide Purchase Orders for special orders that they don't want to be factored into the recommendations.

For importing purchase orders into ForecastRx, we require you to provide a PO Num, Item Name, PO Date, Receive Date, Order Qty, and Open Qty. If we aren’t syncing your purchase orders or warehouse quantities automatically from your data source, use our downloadable CSV file and populate the cells under relevant column headers. When a purchase order is closed, you will delete the data from ForecastRx, or update the Open Qty to 0 for each applicable item. 

Take A Closer Look

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