October 2024 - What's New at Confido
This month, we've been excited to chip away at helping sales forecasting and trade optimization easier for our brands, alongside dozens of cash application and deductions improvements.
Let's dive in.
New ROI View
Sales teams often struggle to determine how much profit a promotion truly creates, since there's various factors that go into the calculation, such as trade costs and incremental lifts. In Confido, we ingest data across our entire platform to pull it into our calculation for promotional ROI, saving you time and excel headaches while providing accurate ROI numbers.
The table view enables the user to understand promo spend, gross profit,Lift and ROI, with visuals to compare forecasted vs actual results.
Seasonality Estimates
Having an accurate measure for seasonality is a key input for an accurate bottoms-up sales forecast, but are often inconsistently applied through a highly manual input process. This leads to less flexibility and less accuracy in forecasting.
With Confido, brands can estimate seasonality from sales actuals in order to build an accurate view of seasonality throughout the year.
Let's walk through it;
- Enter the Product Matching Type: Product, Product Family, or Product Attribute
- Enter the Customer Matching Type: Planning Group, Global Customer, Planning Group Attribute
- Click "Refresh Matching Sales" to fetch sales actuals and view in a list and chart view for the selected product and customer.
- Click "Estimate Seasonality Estimate" to view the estimated seasonality from the selected sales actuals.
- Click "Save Seasonality Estimate" to save the seasonality for the selected product and customer.
Growth Factors
As brands are building a bottoms-up Sales forecast for the current or future year, growth expectations for existing or future products and retailers are a key input for accurate forecasting. Growth can come from many different sources - marketing activities, increased household penetration, macro trends, etc.
To further complicate things, there are countless inputs in determining growth for a Product at a Retailer, including past growth, company goals, top-down guidance, and information and goals from the Retailer, making it very much be a combination of art and science.
That's why Confido built Growth Factors - a simple way to model growth over time for given attributes such as product, planning groups, and custom attributes.
Let's dive in!
- First, enter in the product and customer that you want to apply the growth factor for. For instance, apply the growth factor to Granola Bars at Kroger. Next, enter in the growth percentage, and dates.
- After creating the growth factor, you can view the impact on the sales forecast on both total units and velocity, and choose whether or not to apply to the selected forecast version.
COGS
Cost of goods sold (COGS) captures all of the costs that go into producing a product, and it is the largest line item in a CPG brand's P&L. In addition, COGS is a key input to historical promotion performance and future ROI and P&L calculations. However, calculating COGs is not a straightforward process. Similar to seasonality, the COGS for product and account grouping changes throughout the year and will vary year over year, making it difficult to calculate the exact COGs at any given point in time.
Confido's new COGs calculations streamlines this process by enabling users to enter in COGs details at the product level, which will then integrate through the ROI calculations and Opportunities in the Sales Forecast, so users can view how this impact the margin.
Associated Wholesale Grocers
You asked for it - we built it. As our brands continue to scale into more retailers and distributors, Confido continues to add more support for integrations. This month, we added AWG as a supported distributor for our Cash Application module.
Statistical Shipment Forecasting
Creating accurate shipment forecasting is no easy feat -- pulling together an amalgam of numbers every time new actuals are reported is time consuming, but not incorporating all actuals will create an inaccurate forecast.
With Confido's new Statistical Shipment Forecasting feature, CPG brands can immediately find trends in the data and automatically generate a new shipment forecast whenever new actuals flow in.
On any Shipment forecast, Confido will include a recommendation leveraging previous actuals and advanced statistical analysis. The user can accept these recommendations into their forecasts
Product Enhancements
Confido is constantly making small improvements and enhancements - here's some of them.
- Improved Albertson's, HEB, and Kroger integrations
- Enabled expand view for re-pays
- Improved sorting on check page expand table
- Added multiple years support to Accruals Reporting View
- Updated the trade calendar table to show all RTMs in the Ship To column when the planning group of the promotion has multiple RTMs
- Improved Accruals reporting drill downs
- Fixed RTMs for planning group collections with duplicates
- Added latest estimate to accruals reporting
- Added stricter promo matching constraints
- Added ship-to opportunities overlay to incorporate opportunities in the Ship-to forecast
- Added seasonality to opportunities
- Created support for ephemeral rows on the ship-to forecast
- Added forecast version settings modal
- Created opportunities table filtering
- Updated approvals workflow
- Added requirement for product family names
- Added opportunities to net sales view
- Added custom attribute filter field to Promo Performance
- Added support for Associated Wholesale GrocersI
- Improved bulk invoice and journal creation in Netsuite
- Added custom field support for invoices
