Trending and Forecasting

Merchant Magic™ offers several different performance curves that can help you trend your business and help forecast, plan, or predict your store's future. 

Inventory Trending.

The Inventory module allows you to pick a specific item, and graph how many items of that part number were sold over all time, or a specific year.  This graph is shown below.  In this example, the selected year is 2003, part number is "r" for range.  This graph shows 12 points, one for each month in 2003.  As you can see, the sales were up towards the beginning of the year, dipped low in the summer months, and then pulled back up to finish off the year.  If you run this same report over several years, you may see that the summer is a "low" month while the fall and winter are when customers come in for this item.  This would tell you not to overstock range-related items in the summer, but to ramp up range-related inventory in the fall and winter.

Overall Business Trending

You can also choose to run curves to show your annual sales for one year or for all years that you have used the system.  This will show a trend in your overall sales.  It is displayed in dollars, which are dollars brought into the store via sales.  In the example, you can see that for the last 5 years, overall sales are inching upwards.  There was a spike in sales around 10/2001 due to 9/11, but in the whole picture, it has been a slow, steady rise.  You can also see from this 5 year graph that this retailer experiences seasonal variations that repeat each year.

These graphs combined with reports that display information about the best sellers, worst sellers, best sellers in a category or manufacturer, all help in trending and forecasting your business.

Merchant Magic™  POS also has reorder reports that are built-in and that key off of current on-hand quantities and min-max threshold levels.