Merchandise Financial Planning Software: Optimize Financial Goals and Budgets
In retail, achieving financial targets, especially sales, margin, and inventory goals, starts with merchandise financial planning (MFP). However, thanks to the level of detail and data involved, merchandise planning teams often struggle to manage lower-level product hierarchy details. ToolsGroup Merchandise Financial Planning software helps streamline the retail planning process by providing retailers with a singular view to manage multiple brands, channels, and currencies efficiently.
The software supports open-to-buy planning with flexible calendar options, allowing you to manage strategic plan targets over specific periods. Retailers can adjust financial plans from the highest to the lowest levels within the defined product hierarchy, ensuring alignment with business goals across the entire strategic financial plan.
The solution also manages your organization’s traditional open-to-buy plan: You get the flexibility to choose your own planning calendar, plus the ability to manage strategic plan targets across a specific period in time. In addition, as a retailer, you can make changes to merchandise financial plans from the highest to the lowest levels within the defined product hierarchy.
Meet Financial Goals with Enhanced Visibility and Collaboration
Make smarter decisions
ToolsGroup Merchandise Financial Planning enables rapid strategic decision-making through hindsighting, scenario planning, and exception-based reporting. These tools provide insights into customer demand, helping retailers meet financial objectives more effectively.
Increase visibility
Gain visibility into current retail trends and future demand across multiple channels and product categories, allowing you to stay competitive and maximize inventory productivity.
Improve pre-season and in-season planning
Maximize the quality of strategic pre-season and in-season retail plans. ToolsGroup’s system ensures you can efficiently meet customer demand across product lines while optimizing financial performance.
Enhance collaboration
The unified financial planning system encourages cross-functional participation in setting financial targets, giving all teams and stakeholders access to shared financial goals for improved efficiency and accountability.
Why Invest in Digital Merchandise Financial Planning?
Traditional methods like spreadsheets and instinct are no longer sufficient for gaining a competitive edge. A digital transformation is essential, with 55% of retail supply chain executives willing to invest in advanced planning and demand forecasting tools.
- 55% of retail supply chain executives are willing to invest in productive planning and demand forecasting
- 40% of executives are focused on improving real-time supply chain visibility
- 40% of retail executives prioritize integrated operational supply chain planning
Merchandise Financial Planning Software Features
1. Flexible Planning Grid
Manage financial plans with an intuitive grid offering a strategic view of both the financial plan and product hierarchy. Configurable metrics and drill-down capabilities make it easy to track and manage forecasts and cash flow at every level.
Not only is the merchandise financial planning tool delivered with retail industry best-practice base metrics, it’s easy to add additional metrics: Simply drag and drop them into the planning grid.
If you’re a merchandise planner looking for something more advanced, ToolsGroup Financial Planning software offers hundreds of additional metrics to support your merchandise inventory needs.
2. Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Middle-Out Planning
The software supports multiple planning strategies including top-down financial plans, bottom-up category plans, and middle-out store plans. This flexibility allows merchants to compare and reconcile plans across different levels, locking in adjustments and spreading changes across the product hierarchy.
Each planning type can be created independently, allowing multiple roles in your merchandising organization to create their own version of the plan. Merchandisers can then compare plans, reconcile them from the top-down or bottom-up, and lock and spread adjustments at any product, location, or time-level within the retail plan.
3. Location and Category Planning
Get more accurate assortment plans and store clusters. The system automatically balances location and merchandise plans, allowing you to measure performance by location. This is especially useful for fast fashion and category-focused retailers managing product allocation.
4. Open-to-Buy Budgeting
Keep track of inventory spend within your cash flow cycle. Monitor inventory investments at any point in time or the product hierarchy, allowing you to control the budget available for additional receipts or to cut back on unnecessary purchases based on current demand.
Track the amount available to spend on additional receipts, or, cut back on receipts no longer needed within your organization’s merchandise plan. For ease of use, the open-to-buy capability works hand-in-hand with the strategic target setting used during merchandise financial planning.
5. Reconcile Merchandise Financial Plans and Assortment Plans
Perform what-if scenario planning to quickly adjust financial or assortment plans based on market trends. Reconcile core metrics like sales, inventory, and receipts to ensure your plans align with financial goals.