Reseller cash forecast — can you afford this buy? (8 weeks, with gates)

The forecast Eight weeks, with and without the buy

Where you are this week

Capital (stock at cost + cash in the business account, $)

Committed (stock you own, at cost, $)

Reserved (float + anything moved aside, $)

Your ordinary week

Buying ($)

Stock cost released by sales ($)

Profit ($)

Draw — what you pay yourself ($)

Moved to reserve ($)

Your hours (include the weekly review)

The buy you're weighing

What it costs, paid in week 1 ($)

How many items (count)

Net per item when one sells ($)

Sold per week (count)

First sales in week

Extra hours a week it takes (hours)

Ordinary routes you'll skip to make room (week numbers)

A skipped route saves its buying and its hours (below).

Hours a route takes (hours)

Your gates

Cash gate: lowest open-to-buy allowed ($)

Hours gate: most hours a week (hours)

The gates

Cash gate — lowest open-to-buy —

Hours gate — busiest week —

Payback gate — week 8 vs no-buy —

Verdict —

Open-to-buy, week by week

Your hours, week by week

Two charts on purpose: money and hours are different scales, so they never share an axis. Bars over the ceiling turn orange and say so when you hover — or open the table under each chart for every number.

The forecast needs JavaScript. Each week: capital + profit − draw; committed + buying − cost released; reserved + moved aside; open-to-buy = capital − committed − reserved. Run it once with your ordinary week (the baseline) and once with the buy added. The buy passes only if open-to-buy stays at or above your cash gate every week, your hours stay at or under your ceiling every week, and week 8's open-to-buy is at least the baseline's.

Gates written before the offer arrives — and a forecast tested against real weeks — are the method in Reselling — Advanced →

How to read it Profit is not cash

Profit is what a sale leaves once it's sold. Cash is what's in the account on Saturday. Between them sit the weeks a thing spends on the shelf. A buy takes all its money on day one and gives it back a few items at a time — so a business can be profitable every month and still find, the week after a big buy, that it can't afford its ordinary Saturday.

A worked example

The defaults are the book's: a $600 lot of about forty items, each expected to clear about $19.50, selling four a week from week three, taking four extra hours a week — with two ordinary Saturday routes skipped to make room. Open-to-buy falls from $850 to about $257 in week one, stays above the $150 gate, and ends week eight at about $1,254 against the no-buy baseline's $906. Hours peak at 14.6, under a 15-hour ceiling. All three gates pass: yes — only if those two routes are actually skipped. Add live selling's three or four hours on top and the hours gate says no.

Common questions

What is "open-to-buy"?

The cash that's genuinely free to become stock: capital, minus what's already on the shelf at cost, minus what's reserved for postage, supplies and anything else you set aside.

Is this a promise of what will happen?

No — a forecast is a guess built from your own averages. Its value is that you can put each real week beside it and see which assumption was wrong. That's when it starts paying for itself.

This forecast comes from a book.

It's chapter 6 of Reselling — Advanced: the eight-week forecast and the gates that say no before you're tempted.

See the Reselling series →