Initial Setup After First Sync (QuickBooks)

After your data sync has been completed, log in to finish the initial setup, as this will be the criteria used for the first forecast of your data. You can skip any steps if you are unsure of what to enter or if any of the fields do not apply to your company.

This information can be modified at any time while using Inventory Optimizer and the Inventory Optimizer onboarding team will help you enter the correct information later if needed. 

Company Info:

Global Defaults:

Here you will enter top-level settings for your company that will apply to all products unless you edit the settings for the individual suppliers or items. Lead Time is the average number of days it takes from issuing a purchase order to the products being available for sale. Order Interval is the number of days between each purchase order on average. For example, if you place purchase orders weekly, you would enter 7 days. Lead time and order interval are important because together they make up your sales horizon. This number of days will be how much inventory we recommend you purchase to cover. 

Service Level and Additional Inventory will influence your safety stock. On top of purchasing to cover your sales horizon, we recommend adding safety stock. For forecast recommendations, you will set a Service Level from 0-10 for how much safety stock to be added on. 

For more information on understanding service level, click here. 

For daily sales rate recommendations, you will set Additional Inventory for how many additional days of stock you would like as safety stock, on top of your sales horizon (lead time + order interval). 

Currency will default to USD, but you can change this at any time and all monetary fields in Inventory Optimizer will convert to the currency selected.

Email notifications will be sent out to all associated users of the company when a sync and forecast is completed unless toggled off. 

Associated Users allows you to add additional users to the company you are setting up. Make sure the users you are adding have created a user profile with Inventory Optimizer before adding them to the company. 

Purchasing Daily Sales Rate Rules:

Select how you would like daily sales rates calculated for your purchasing recommendations. This is a global setting that will apply to all product purchasing recommendations unless modified on the supplier or item level. 

We recommend setting automatically adjusted weightings where the percentages are distributed automatically to various lookback windows based on each product's sales history. For example, a product that has been selling for less than 90 days will not have any weight placed on the 180-day range or the forecasted demand because it has not been available for sale long enough for that period or an accurate demand forecast. 

If you choose to use Average, you can select the weight distribution across multiple lookback windows and the forecasted demand to calculate your average daily sales rate.

For more information on Purchasing Daily Sales Rate, click here. 

Suppliers

Your suppliers that have been identified from QuickBooks will populate here automatically, but you will need to update the lead time and order interval accordingly. You also have the option to add MOQ, email address, and set Service Level per supplier if needed. If there are suppliers synced that are not needed, you can either hide them or ignore them. If items are not linked to the supplier, the supplier will not be in use. 

Items

Items will automatically sync your active products from QuickBooks, their sales history, and inventory quantities. The Items tab has a lot of data that you can edit, but not all fields may be necessary for your business and can be edited at any later time. The most important fields to fill in (if applicable) would be MOQ, Case Pack Qty, and Service Level (if you want safety stock to vary per item). In addition, if there are items populated that you are no longer selling, you can hide them in this step. Modifications can be made by selecting the cells in the grid, or through a "Bulk Management" upload.

For more information on uploading data files to ForecastRx, click here.

Demand and Supply

Demand (sales) and Supply (purchase orders) are synced automatically from QuickBooks so no updates are needed in these steps.

Finished

The final step of onboarding is to schedule a meeting with Inventory Optimizer staff to go over your data, make modifications if necessary, and answer your questions about using Inventory Optimizer going forward. Once a meeting is set, select "Run Forecast" to analyze your data to produce your first forecast and recommendations. Once the forecast is completed, your account will remain in locked status until you meet with Inventory Optimizer staff. Your 30-day free trial does not begin until the account is unlocked because we would like to maximize your usage of the free trial period. 

If you prefer to skip the meeting with Inventory Optimizer staff or have your account unlocked before the meeting, you can request this under Step 1 as well.

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