Sales Forecasts by Categories

There are two types of sales forecasts in Rise Business:

To enable sales forecasts by categories, go to Master data and settings – Budgeting and planning and select the Sales forecasts by categories checkbox.

With sales forecasts by categories, you can do the following:

A product category is a group of products that is convenient to manage.

To enable product categories, go to Master data and settings – CRM and marketing and select the Product categories.

To create a product category:

In the item card, you can specify which product category the item belongs to:

To create a sales forecast by category:

6. On the Product categories tab, specify a list of categories to sell and their quantity. You can fill in the document automatically using the following commands:

If Fill in by sources population option is selected in the plan profile:

• Click Fill in categories > By filter... to fill items using goods selection tool by any parameters (item, warehouse, price, retail format, and so on). OR
• Click Fill in categories > By custom rule. It will open the Fill in plan form where you can set the data source to fill in the quantity. The sources for filling in the quantity are planning data sources.

If Fill in using formula population option is selected in the plan profile, click Fill in categories. It will open the Fill in plan form where you can:
1)Fill in items:

• By all product categories. Adds all product categories participated in sales.
• From formula. Product categories will be received from the operands specified in the formula.
• By filter. Allows you to fill in categories by the arbitrary filter set in the document.

2) Fill in quantity using the formula.

To import lines from the spreadsheet:

• Click the Import from external file icon.
• In the import from external file form, paste data copied from the spreadsheet.
• Click Next. The system will automatically parse all the data pasted and fill in the form with the system master data.
• Review and amend the information and click Move and close. The system will automatically fill in the form.

7. Set the document status to Confirmed.

8. Click Post and close.

If the sales volume depends on the number of items included in one product category, it is recommended that you plan sales according to the sales speed.

For example, a product category includes 10 phone models, and 1,000 units will be sold per month. And if there are already 15 models in the product category and 1,500 units will be sold, it is recommended that you plan sales according to the sales speed.

You can forecast the sales speed by ranks and product categories.

Before you start planning by product categories, taking into account sales ranks, specify product categories and sales ranks for all items for which this planning option will be used:

To enable classifying items by sales ranks, go to Master data and settings – CRM and marketing – Marketing – Sales ranks.

You can create sales ranks in CRM and marketing – Settings and catalogs – Product range management – Sales ranks. They allow you to group items by product category, depending on their sales speed.

As sales ranks, you can use both arbitrary text values (for example, "low", "medium", and "high") and more detailed descriptions with various additional details. You can specify ranks as a percentage of the average sales of all products by product category. It is necessary to decide which system will be used to determine the rank (for example, a 10-point system, a 5-point system, or a 100 percent system).

For example, there are 30 different TV models in one product category. For convenience, we classify the list of these models by sales ranks. The first 50% of the models (15 items in the product category) from the list are assigned a "High" rank, the second 50% – a "Medium" rank.

You can assign product categories and sales ranks to items using bulk processing. Just selected the required items in the Items catalog and click Bulk actions.

Planning by sales speed is available if the Calculation by sales speed checkbox is selected in the planning scenario. In this case, you can specify the sales rank and speed in the sales forecast by category.

Parameters of the sales forecast by category according to the sale speed:

Different sales ranks of the same product category can have different sale speed.

You can break down sales forecast by categories to sales forecast by items using distribution standards.

Example:

We are planning to sell 10,000 items of the Women clothes product category.

The category contains 5 items. The items can be of two colors (black and white) and sizes from 42 to 46. According to statistics, among the sold items, 60% are black and 40% are white. For colors, the situation is as follows: size 42 - 10% of sales, 43 - 15%, 44 - 35%, 45 - 20%, 46 - 20%. When we create sales forecasts, we want to take into account these two parameters (the size and color). So, we need to register distribution standards. Let's do it step by step.

First, we need to create additional attributes for our item variants. There will be two: size and color. To create them:

Now open item variants of each item in your category and map additional attributes to variants as it is done on the figure below:

Finally, create distribution standards for the system to decompose the sales forecast by category to the sales forecast by items using the specified percentage:

To decompose the sales forecast by categories to items, the system multiplies the standards as follows: 10 000 / 5 * 60% * 20% = 240 black items of size 46. This logic applies to all items of the category. The total number of items in the resulting sales forecast will be 10,000.

To create a sales forecast by item based on sales forecast by category:

9. On the Payment tab (available if sales prices are applied in the plan profile), enter the payment schedule. The total amount of planned payments must match the total amount of goods on the Goods tab.
10. Set the document status to Confirmed.
11. Click Post and close.

If no distribution standards are created, the system will split categories into items evenly.