Ladder Planning

Ladder Planning

The Ladder Planning tool is used in addition to the Planning Worksheet for customers who need to keep track of weekly cash register sales (POS sales), and to make sure inventory meets demand. The Ladder Plan only allows Item and Customer data to be viewed, giving you the opportunity to focus solely on customer item needs. You can also edit the lower level data in the Ladder Plan to adjust the future plan. 

Ladder Planning logs weekly sales for the customer. The default view of the Ladder Plan is to show 6 weeks of historical data before your planning date, and 12 weeks of future planned data after your planning date. 

The Ladder planning source data is a series of 4 tables that should be in the selected data source. When launching Ladder Planning, the Select a Data Source popup will launch. Please select an ingest source before continuing to the Ladder Planning. 




If you would like to upload a spreadsheet using the Microsoft Excel option, please first cancel out of the Select a Data Source window and click the down arrow next to Upload Data and download the Starter Template. This will help you set up your spreadsheet for data ingestion. 





For SQL and Enterprise (which is basically remote SQL) the 4 tables are defined and shown below. The Structure in SQL should be: 

Stock History












Sales Forecast













Promotion Forecast




POS Sales





Using Ladder Planning

To start using Ladder Planning, click the Upload Data button. The Select a Data Source popup window will launch.








  1. If this is your first time uploading data to the Ladder Planning tool, you can download a Starter Template Excel file with sample data to show you how your data should be structured. 
  1. Click the dropdown arrow next to the Upload Data button, then click the Starter Template button to download the Excel sheet.





  1. The template has four sheets:
    1. Stock History: The weekly stocks of your customer's inventory by item code and customer code.
    2. Sales Forecast: The weekly sales a customer has forecasted to sell by item.
    3. Promotion Forecast: The weekly sales for a customer due to promotions for that week.
    4. POS Sales: The weekly POS sales for each customer by item. Only the historical sales records are needed, as the rest will be forecasted in the application.

Each sheet in the Starter Template Excel document has a table of item-customer data arranged by a date. Generally the date is the Monday for each week. As mentioned, Ladder Planning operates on a time window from 6 weeks of historical data before your planning date to 12 weeks in the future after your planning date; if Planning Date is 8/1/2023, your data should start from 6/20/2023 to 10/17/2023.

Formulas were used to generate the dates shown in the template. You can adjust the dates by editing the date in cell E1 of the first page of the template sheet. The formulas do not need to be maintained to upload to the application, as they are for demo purposes only.

The sample data in this template has a planning start of 8/1/2022. This data should be replaced with your data and planning start before uploading to the application.

  1. When the template is ready with your data, click the Upload File button, then select your Excel file. Next, click Continue.












  1. A Summary grid can be viewed when more than one customer / item combination, assuming the items are the same unit of measure. The summary level is not override editable. When only one customer / item combination has been selected, the summary grid is not available. Lower level customer / item combinations data can be overwritten in the yellow cells. 

  1. Information available in the Ladder Planning table grid
    1. Starting Stocks (Reported / Calculated): Projected inventory.  
    2. Sales Forecasts: Projected sales.
    3. Promotions Forecasts: Projected promotional sales.
    4. POS Actuals / Forecasts: Projected POS sales.
    5. Sell Through Rate (%): measures the percentage of POS sales (POS Actuals / Forecasts value) relative to the amount of Starting Stock.
    6. Total Shipment Receipts: Incoming inventory received by the customer. This is Demand in the Planning Worksheet.
    7. Unit Cost (Lower level data only): Cost per item. 
    8. COGS: Value deducted from Revenues in order to calculate the Margin.
    9. Revenue
    10. Margin

  1. Click the Filter button to launch the Filter drawer to select and drilldown Item and Customer data.  









  1. The selected filter will be saved temporarily to the Filter dropdown.




You can also right-click the Planning Ladder grid to compare the data with the Planning Worksheet. This action will open the Planning Worksheet in a new tab.








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