Open to buy, automated.

What you see

One row per category, for the month you are looking at. Every sale and every purchase order in your point of sale feeds it: what the category sold last year, what is on the shelf now, what is already on order, and what is left to spend.

Example figures for one month, at cost. Growth 0%, turn rate 4. Plan is the stock target. These numbers are computed by the same code the product runs on, so you can check them with your own formula.

How the number is worked out

Nothing here is proprietary, and that is deliberate. It is the arithmetic a six-month merchandise plan has used for decades.

1. Sales goal. Last year's sales for the same month, adjusted by your growth percentage. Outerwear sold $18,400 last year, and at 0% growth the goal is the same figure.
2. Inventory plan. The goal multiplied by twelve divided by your turn rate. At a turn rate of 4 that is three months of stock: $55,200.
3. Open to buy. Next month's plan, minus what this month leaves behind. Outerwear holds $56,400 and expects to sell $18,400 of it, so it closes at $38,000. Add the $9,600 already on order and this month accounts for $47,600. Against a plan of $55,200, that leaves $7,600 still to spend.

One wrinkle worth knowing if you keep your own sheet. When stock falls below plan, plan becomes the closing basis rather than actual stock, which is what stops a category that is already short from reporting a larger open to buy than it should. Every row above sits at or above plan, which is where that branch and the plain textbook formula give the same answer.

If you already run this in Excel, the arithmetic is not what we would change. We checked ours against a real buyer's workbook and it matched to the cent; what went wrong in that workbook was the document, not the formulas.

At cost, or at retail. You choose.

Buyers genuinely disagree about this, and both camps are right. Retail is the older convention and is what most six-month plans are written in. Cost is what you actually put on a purchase order. Rebridge carries both and the switch is one click.

The rule that matters is that every term inside one calculation sits on the same basis. Mixing them is the quiet error that makes a sheet say a category is overbought when it is not, and it is enforced in the product rather than left to care.

A budget is not an open to buy

Open to buy is computed and moves as your sales, stock and orders move. A budget is a ceiling you set by hand for a category and a month. Both are useful and they answer different questions, so Rebridge shows them side by side. When approving an order would push a category past its budget, you get a warning. It informs; it does not block. The decision stays yours.

What it needs, and what it does not do yet

Rebridge works with Lightspeed Retail R-Series today. Sales, stock and open orders sync automatically, so there is nothing to key in and no spreadsheet to maintain. If you are on a different point of sale, tell us which one and we will let you know when it is supported.

One thing worth stating up front, because a buyer will look for it. An open order counts in the month it is due to arrive, and it becomes stock in the months after that, which is the final step of a textbook open-to-buy plan. That depends on the order carrying an arrival date. Orders without one, and orders whose date has already passed while they are still open, count in the current month instead, so nothing is ever counted twice or quietly dropped.

In practice most purchase orders do not carry a date yet, because the field is optional in Lightspeed and rarely filled. Until they do, expect most of your open orders to sit in the current month, which is the cautious reading rather than an optimistic one.

Questions