Breww has a brand-new beer stock availability forecasting tool!
The tool replaces our original “Product allocation report” and builds on it to do so much more. This can be found at Reporting → Pre-built production & inventory reports → Stock availability forecast.
You can choose when you’d like Breww to forecast until and how Breww should forecast future sales. Breww will then fast-forward time and show you when your current stock is expected to run out for all your beer products.
If you add your planned batches and planned packagings to Breww, this information will also be used in your report - so you can see not only when your existing stock is likely to run out, but also when it will run out if you package what you’ve planned to.
There’s a few options for how to get Breww calculate your future sales, and we’ll be adding more (even more advanced) options to this in the future.
But, that’s not all! On all cask, keg and smallpack (single) products, we’ll show you a quick forecast on the product page to save you needing to run the whole report. Here’s an example:
The red bars represent sales of stock, the green bars represent planned packagings, and the blue line shows you the resulting stock level at the end of that day.
Forecasting sales is a complex process (with entire businesses dedicated to the cause), and this has been compounded by the challenges added by Covid. For this reason, especially at the moment, you might need to tweak the inputs a little based upon what you know, that realistically a computer can’t.
For example, if you know that historically you didn’t sell much in the way of bottles and most sales were cask/keg, then Covid caused a shift towards bottle sales, and you’re now experiencing a switch back, you might need to tweak down the number of weeks for sales to look back at. This will help the tool look at sales that are more likely to represent future sales. If your sales/product mix didn’t change much due to Covid, you can likely extend this time period in order to get a better average which isn’t skewed by particularly good/bad weeks.
We’re going to be adding some other options down the line which understand seasonality and can help forecast sales even more accurately. In the meantime, if you make sure all your sales/production data is going through Breww, this will give the forecasting models as much data to work from as possible.
