Future Dated Forecasts: Smarter Suggested Orders, Powered by Your Own Forecasts

Suggested Ordering normally works out how much stock you need based on your last 28 days of sales. That's a solid baseline, but it doesn't know about the things you do: an upcoming bank holiday, a big local event, a menu promotion, or a seasonal shift you can already see coming.

Future Dated Forecasts closes that gap. If you run a forecasting or AI/ML data model that predicts how much of each product you'll use, day by day, that model can feed those predictions directly into your ordering setup, so your Suggested Orders are built on expected consumption, not just historical averages.

This is not about feeding in a revenue or sales figure for us to scale up. It works at product level: your system tells us how many units of a specific product at a specific outlet it expects to be used on a specific day, and we use that number in place of the historical average when building the Suggested Order.

How it works

Once switched on, Suggested Ordering swaps its usual historical average for your forecasted figures, product by product, outlet by outlet, day by day. Everything else about the ordering process stays exactly the same: stock you already hold, stock on the way, buffer stock, pack sizes, and maximum order quantities are all still taken into account. The only thing that changes is where the demand number comes from.

This works for both manual orders your team places and fully automated ordering runs.

What you'll notice

You can still set how far ahead your outlet teams are allowed to place orders, so the feature fits around your existing ordering rhythm rather than replacing it. And because every order is now tagged as manual, automated, or neither, you can easily compare what the system suggested against what actually got ordered.

Getting started

This feature needs to be switched on for your organisation, and it works alongside forecast data, so a bit of setup is involved before it goes live. If this sounds like it would help your ordering process, get in touch with your Zonal Account Representative to talk through enabling it.