Annual Planning and Forecasting for CPG Brands

It's that time of year ago - annual planning season. Time to circle up with the team and forecast for next year. Let's walk through the main processes of annual planning and how it would work in Confido.

Opportunities - Building Scenario Analysis

Expanding distribution is a key input into forecasts and scenario planning, which users can configure through opportunities, in the Sales Forecast section.

Users can input the retailer, product, Target shelf date, Number of stores, Expected Velocity, and Likelihood.

After the opportunity is created, it can then be viewed in the sales forecast with the weighted probability.

Creating an Opportunity

Viewing Opportunity in the Sales Forecast

Copying Forecasts

Confido allows anyone to create user-specific forecast versions, without editing the company-wide forecast. This allows users to create scenarios to test various forecast assumptions.

To use this feature, go into Sales > Forecast

Click "Copy"

Merging Forecasts

The sales manager can track the multiple copies of the sales forecast from the entire team, and easily merge into a centralized forecast for the changes that are approved.

Go to the forecast version that other members have submitted to for approval, click "Merge", and go into each level of change you'd like to merge, and select the row to merge.

Copying Promotions

To copy promotions from a previous period to the next planning period, simply go into the promotion that the user wants to copy, and click the icon to copy.

The user is directed to the editing page, where they are able to edit any dates and other details about the promotion.

Afterwards, the user can publish the copy of the promotion for the new dates, and any other adjustments made. This makes it dead simple to copy promotions onto the next year that you're planning for.

Copying Multiple Promotions

To copy multiple promotions, select the promotions that the team wishes to copy, select "Duplicate Selected Promotions".

Next choose whether to duplicate by year or time period. When duplicating by year, Confido will duplicate the promotion for the same month, and change the year. When duplicating by time period, Confido will duplicate the promotion for the month and year selected.

More questions around annual planning? The team at Confido is here to help. You know where to find us!