Inventory Planner Forecasting , 127 reviews

We have been using inventory planner for about 6 months now and I don't see how we can function without. There's a lot of functionality to this program and yes it will take a minute to get a good grasp on it but once you do, you'll be glad you are using it. There is good support documentation with videos and tech support has been great. The onboarding team is great as well. They know the software inside and out. It's extremely powerful. Inventory forecasting and planning is complicated in general so you need a software program that can handle it, and this one does the trick. It's not cheap, we spend $20K a year but it's worth it. Look at it as hiring a data analytics person on the team for 20K. Not only that, it will help you manage your inventory purchases, so you're not over or under ordering stock.

We have 13 retail locations and we use it extensively for generating stock transfers to our stores from our warehouse. No more guessing on how much inventory to send to a store. There is also a nice feature that will automatically generate stock transfers and purchases orders on a schedule you configure. I have it set to place them in draft mode and run weekly. Then I can approve or make edits to them before sending it to the warehouse to fill. This has saved us countless hours.

The support has been great too. There has been several times I need a certain functionality and they were able to accommodate it, not in every case but 90% of the time.

Just like any software, it's not 100% when forecasting, sometimes you need to use your judgement. The more data it collects over time, the smarter it gets.

The software is not for everyone but if you have multiple retail locations / warehouses or just need a better way to manage your inventory purchases so you aren't over stocking, then I would recommend checking this one out. It's a great way to help streamline your operations.

If they had inventory management or WMS tied into this, this would make it even more powerful.

The app is very useful. Dated UI but overall functional. Support and billing, however, is a nightmare.

If you're a new customer signing onto their new pricing model and the setup is correct from the start, you'll likely enjoy the product.

If you have any questions or need assistance with your account, buckle up and get ready to have your patience tested. Repeatedly.

For most customers this will be an important pieces of their tech stack. And once integrated for inventory management, the cost and hassle of switching to another tool means customers are a little locked in. In my experience that lock in risk is not offset with good support times or follow through. Fingers crossed that improves.

I love this app. I can't even imagine how I would have grown my 3 location business without it. My only complaint is that the fee went up a bit but I cannot complain when I've doubled my sales and cut my inventory management workload down to a few hours per week vs a few hours per day. This app is a must to have the product available when customers want it or you are missing out on sales.

Held hostage on a 12 month contract with Brightpearl on this Inventory Planner app, was paying about $300/month and they jacked it up over $600/month and required us to sign a 12 month contract. All this during our busiest time of year here in Q4, and threatened to shut down our account if we didn't renew even with asking to push the renewal to January 2023. Software isn't bad, but the service and sales tactics are the worst I have ever expierenced with a software company. Be warned and Brightpearl/Sage, really disappointed in the way you treated us on this and gave us no other option. -Ian, Co-Founder & CEO

To Further my response in response to your response Tom, you are actually making it worse by responding the way you have. There was no "free access through December" we have still been paying monthly at our more reasonable rate of $300/month, and you told us about our price increase right at the Q4 window, and still to this date havent given us a great answer into your complicated formula as to how you increased our price the way you did. We were told if we didn't sign a new contract in December that you would revoke our access to the software, so please don't try to and manipulate the way this all happened. Hand's down one of the worst experiences we have had with software, and your response is making it worse. My recommendation, just be honest and authentic with something like, "Sage bought BrightPearl, BrightPearl bought IP, and someone made a poor business decision to hold businesses hostage in their busiest time of year since they would have no other option, happy holidays"

The app itself is helpful, but I've never seen slower support.

After our trial phase I wanted to sign up as paying customer and could not log in due to a technical issue being redirected constantly to the "end of trial" phase page.

No replies whatsoever from the support. Not what you expect from such an app.

Inventory Planner has streamlined our ordering process. It is so clear to see what's selling through, what needs ordered and what's not selling. The filtering is endless so you can keep going deeper and deeper into searches and really refine what you are after.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants clearer visibility about their stock, sales and trends

THIS APP DOES NOT DO WHAT IT IS DESIGNED TO DO.

The logic this software uses is fundamentally flawed and there doesn't seem to be any fix for this. Once you realize this you will spend days going back and forth with their support chat as they only respond once every 4 hours if your lucky.

If your products have a long lead time (in our case 3 months) and you sell out of inventory during this time and are waiting for new stock to arrive this app will add the lost sales quantities into your next replenishment ON TOP of the units you are forecasted to sell for the month.

If historically you sell 100 units a month and are out of stock for 3 months their calculated replenishment recommendation will tell you that you need to order 400 units for you next order as if you will magically be able to sell 4x your monthly average. This issue is amplified even further when your sales are growing month over month.

At the very least you should be able to disable this functionality, and not add lost sales quantities into the active forecast, but their only solution is to manually edit the forecast for every single item.

The most expensive app I use, but my god is it helpful. I have literally no idea how I lived without it. Makes ordering and planning so much easier, and support is very helpful, thanks guys!

We've been using this app for about 2 years and we cannot imagine living without it anymore! :-) We have made some major changes recently and it took us a while to get everything set up. Anyway, the support is very helpful and patiently walked us through all the settings. Our special thanks goes to Chan personally! We can only recommend this app.

A great tool that is essential for any startup business in e-commerce. Inventory planner guides allow people of any knowledge to pick up merchandising and the system will save you a lot of time and money.