An open-to-buy plan is an inventory management tool that helps you build a plan and figure out how much inventory you need to buy on a monthly basis to make your sales (in the retail world). It’s a guide for the amount of dollars you have to spend on merchandise, and constantly flexes based on how you are business is doing.
How it works
The numbers show you what is selling and what needs to be marked down and moved to give you room to bring in new products that people would want to buy. Yes, planning is structured, but it also allows you room to adjust as needed which is why we plan on the category level.
Planning allows you to set goals and helps you work towards achieving them. It allows you to measure effective inventory in your store, which is something that is impossible to do without knowing retail receivables, inventory and vendor returns.
Our Open-to-Buy service will work with you to do the following:
Review your financials and current cash situations
Estimate how much your business can improve and profit with OTB
Determine a baseline for planning your classes, inventory levels and seasonal changes
Provide monthly plans to follow that will show you how you did, how you are doing and what we think you can do moving forward. It will include topics such as sales, OTB dollars, markdowns, fresh factor, turns, inventory levels and on order (receiving).
The numbers give you a holistic picture of your business. They show you what is selling and what needs to be marked down and moved out to give you room to bring in fresh products that people would want to buy. Planning gives you the wiggle room to adjust “on the fly”. This also allows you to set tangible goals, while we help you work towards achieving them.
What you get
Retail Concepts will meet (or telecommunicate, depending on your location) with you every month to review/present your plan, talk about challenges and opportunities and trouble shoot any inventory and open-to-buy issues you may be facing.
We’ll also teach you how to read a plan, play connect the dots with all those numbers and even take some pretty fancy calculations.