Reserving stock for pre-season estimates can be helpful if you're running a business where you have seasonal stock. You may need to contact all of your best customers at the start of the season and ask them how many of this new line of products they're likely to sell, providing you with their pre-season orders.
These pre-season orders may require you to reserve a particular quantity of products each month. For example, 10x 1.5 AAA Batteries in February and 20 in March. The customer hasn't ordered these products and don't want you to automatically send them, but they have made a broad commitment to ordering these items. Therefore, your Sales team may need to contact these customers each month to see if they would still like their pre-season order. If this customer is likely to place the order, then you may want to ensure the stock is available for their pre-season order. To help manage stock levels with pre-season orders, the CRM provides stock levels taking into account the pre-season estimates.
In the screenshot below, we have the 1.5 AAA Battery product, which currently has an Available from Stock of 34 and an Available with Pre-season stock of -41.
Step 1: Create a Quote
In order to set a pre-season estimate for a customer, you will need to create a Quote and add the required products. In the below screenshot, we have a Quote with the 1.5 AAA Battery product added which has a quantity of 4. We can also see that the 'Reserve Stock' is currently set to 'Not Reserved'.
Step 2: Select Pre-season Estimate
To set this order to a pre-season estimate, simply click on the 'Reserve Stock' drop-down and select 'Pre-season Estimate'.
By selecting the 'Pre-season Estimate' option, the 'Available with Preseason' stock level has decreased to -45 for the 1.5 AAA Battery product, showing that we would need an additional 45 batteries in order to fulfil all the pre-season estimates. The 'Available from Stock' level will be different as this shows what you actually have available, as the pre-season estimates are not an actual order yet. Being able to see these two stock level figures will help your Sales team manage expectations for actual orders and pre-season orders.
