My Sales Forecast is too low

Understanding Sales Forecast Adjustments

At Shelf Planner, we use sophisticated algorithms to ensure that your sales forecasts are as accurate as possible. However, there are instances where the forecast might appear lower than expected. This page explains some of the rules we have in place that might affect your sales forecast.

Cleansing Rules

Markdown Adjustments

When your store has a significant number of markdowns over a certain period, our system takes this into account when calculating the new forecast. This adjustment prevents the forecast from being inflated after a temporary sale period, ensuring more accurate future predictions.

Outlier Cleansing

Another rule that might affect your sales forecast is what we call 'outlier cleansing.' This rule is designed to normalize sales data when there are unusual spikes.

For example, if you experience a sales peak for an item in a particular week that is significantly higher than usual, the system will automatically recalculate this to a 'normalized' sales figure. This helps in maintaining a forecast that is reflective of typical sales patterns rather than temporary anomalies.

Handling Growth and Outliers

We understand that your store might be experiencing growth, and our system does take this into account. However, if there is a sudden spike in sales, such as the significant increase that is above the outlier thresholds, it can happen that the system may interpret this as an outlier and adjust the forecast accordingly. Our algorithms are designed to learn and adapt, so in most cases this will be picked up for every day that passes.

Manual Adjustments and Monitoring

In cases where the automatic adjustments lead to forecasts that are too conservative, we have the capability to manually intervene. For instance, we can remove the outlier cleansing rule temporarily and monitor the forecast to ensure it aligns more closely with your actual sales trends. 

Machine Learning - Human Interpretation

Our goal is to provide you with the most accurate sales forecasts possible. The forecast is generated automatically using hundreds of datapoints every day, but in the end, sometimes it just needs some human interpretation to make sense of it all. 

Please reach out to the support team (help@shelfplanner.com) or in the 'Help' function in the app if you feel the sales forecast is still incorrect and need some help tweaking it.