Buyer's Guide

Buying well is the foundation of retail profitability. Order too much and you tie up cash, invite markdowns, and exit the season with leftover stock. Order too little and you miss sales, frustrate customers, and leave money on the table.

VMX gives buyers a suite of interconnected reports that answer the core questions: What do I have? What did I sell? What should I order? Am I making money on it? This guide walks through each tool, explains when to use it, and shows how they fit together into a complete buying workflow.

Understanding Your Stock Position

Before you place an order, you need to know where you actually stand.

On Hand / Order / Sales

Reports → Ordering → On Hand/Order/Sales

This report gives you a quick snapshot of each department's stock position expressed in weeks on hand — the number of weeks your current inventory would last at your current rate of sales.

How to read it:

Weeks on Hand is calculated as: on-hand quantity ÷ average weekly sales
A department running 2–3 weeks on hand mid-season is healthy
Under 1 week means you're at risk of stocking out before a reorder arrives
8+ weeks on hand late in the season means you bought too much and need to slow down or start discounting

Use this as your first scan when opening a buying session. Anything with an unusually low or high weeks-on-hand number is a priority to investigate further.

Sales → Items

Reports → Sales → Items

This report lets you slice a specific time period and see exactly what moved. The real power is using it to compare the same period last year to your current stock levels.

A useful workflow: set the date range to "the next 3 weeks, last year." The report will show you:

Starting Qty — what you had at the start of that period last year
Received — what came in during the period
Sold — what actually moved
Ending Qty — where you ended up

Compare the Ending Qty column to your current on-hand. If you ended last year's comparable period with 40 units and you currently have 12, you're going to run short. If you ended with 10 and you have 60 today, you're over-stocked relative to demand.

You can filter by department or vendor to focus your analysis.

Planning Your Orders

Once you know your stock position, the next step is determining how much to order and when.

Order Planning

Reports → Ordering → Order Planning

Order Planning is the most powerful tool for item-level buying decisions. You give it two dates — ETA (when you expect inventory to arrive) and Stock Period End (when you want to be stocked through) — and it calculates a suggested quantity for every item, taking into account:

Current on-hand quantity
Projected sales over that period (based on your sales history)
Customer wish-fors (pent-up demand from customers who've requested the item)
Quantity already on order from existing purchase orders

The result is a Qty to Order column — the amount you'd need to buy right now to be stocked through your target end date.

Pay attention to the Seasonality column:

Green / low percentage — the item's peak season is ahead; demand is expected to increase
Red / high percentage — the item's peak has passed; be cautious about ordering more

You can filter by vendor (useful when you're building a specific order) and by department. The Cost to Order column lets you see the estimated dollar commitment before you commit.

Open to Buy

Reports → Ordering → Open to Buy

Where Order Planning works item-by-item, Open to Buy works at the dollar level. It answers the question: How much should I be spending on inventory for this department each month or week?

Understanding turn rate:

Turn rate is the number of times a department sells through its average inventory in a year. A department that turns 4× per year has about 3 months of supply on the floor at any given time.

To find your target interval for Open to Buy, think about how often you want to "turn over" your investment in a category:

Pottery that moves once every six months → 6-month interval
Annuals that sell through in 4–6 weeks → 4–6 week interval
Perennials that turn 3× a year → roughly 4-month interval

Enter that interval into the Open to Buy report and it will show you, for each upcoming period, how much dollar value you should be committing to orders — accounting for what you already have on hand and what's already on order.

Three versions of this report:

Open to Buy — Single department, period-by-period
Open to Buy – All — All departments at once, in one view
Open to Buy – Items — Breaks the OTB dollar amount down to the item level within a department

Tip

Open to Buy is a budget-level guardrail, not a line-item order guide. Use it alongside Order Planning — OTB tells you how much to spend, Order Planning tells you what to buy.

Tracking What You've Received

Good buying also means auditing your own purchasing history.

Departments Receiving

Reports → Ordering → Departments Receiving

This report shows every item received in a date range — what came in, which vendor it came from, and what it cost. Use it to:

Audit a vendor relationship — how much did you spend with a given vendor this spring vs. last spring?
Verify deliveries — did everything from a PO actually come in as expected?
Budget reviews — compare total receiving cost by department across seasons

Filter by department and set a date range (e.g., March 1 – May 31 of this year vs. last year) to get a direct comparison of spending patterns.

Spotting Trends Visually

Numbers in tables are harder to interpret than lines on a graph. Your eye can detect a trend that would take ten minutes to find manually in a spreadsheet.

Inventory Graphs

Reports → Inventory → Graphs

The Inventory Graphs report plots your inventory cost on the ground over time, broken down by department and compared year-over-year.

What to look for:

Inventory dipping lower than historical — if your perennial inventory is lower right now than it was at this time last year (or the year before), and you're heading into peak season, that's an undersupply signal. Act before you run out.
Inventory still elevated as you exit a season — if your summer annual inventory is trending higher than past years as you approach August, you're going to have leftover stock. Consider discounting earlier and buying less for the remainder of the season.
Unusual spikes or dips — these often correspond to a large PO receipt or an unexpected strong sales week. Worth investigating.

Filter by specific departments to see each one clearly. Click on years in the legend to show or hide them. Hover over data points to see exact values.

Sales Graphs

Reports → Sales → Graphs

The Sales Graphs report does the same thing for your sales dollars — how much you sold in each department, week by week or month by month, compared to prior years.

The diagnostic question: If sales in a category are lagging behind prior years, ask yourself:

Is it a supply problem? — Check Inventory Graphs. If your inventory is also low, you might literally not have enough product to sell.
Is it a merchandise or display problem? — If your inventory is normal or high but sales are low, the product is there — customers just aren't buying it. That's a different problem: pricing, placement, or selection.

Finding Dead Weight and Stars

Every buying program has inventory that's performing and inventory that isn't. Identifying both is essential.

Best/Worst Selling

Reports → Inventory → Best/Worst Selling

Run this for a period that matches your season. The report shows you:

Retail price, average cost, and current on-hand quantity
Total sales, COGS, gross profit, and units sold for the period

Worst sellers are inventory with "no birthdays" — items that haven't moved. These are candidates for:

Discounting or clearance pricing
Reduced repurchase (buy fewer or none next season)
Consolidating to a single location or removing from the floor

Best sellers are the items your store runs on. For these, the risk is stockouts — if your best seller is down to 3 units mid-season, get a reorder in before you run out entirely.

Items Not Selling

Reports → Inventory → Items Not Selling

A more focused view of stagnant inventory — items with on-hand quantity but no recent sales activity. Use this to build your markdown list or to identify items that may have been miscategorized, mislabeled, or are just genuinely slow.

Measuring Return on Investment

Ultimately, buying is about putting money to work. GMROII tells you which departments are doing that efficiently.

GMROII

Reports → Inventory → GMROII

GMROII stands for Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment. It tells you how much gross profit you generated for every dollar of inventory you had on the floor.

The formula: Net Profit ÷ Average Inventory Cost × 100

A GMROII of 200 means you generated $2 of gross profit for every $1 of average inventory.

Two levers explain almost all GMROII problems:

Problem	Symptom	Diagnosis
Margin	GMROII is low even though the department turns well	You're pricing too low or taking too many markdowns — a pricing problem
Turn	Margin looks fine but GMROII is low	Inventory sits too long before it sells — a purchasing problem

Use GMROII to:

Identify departments that look profitable but are actually tying up too much capital
Find lean departments that punch above their weight — and consider investing more there
Spot pricing inconsistencies where margin is unusually low or high compared to similar categories

Putting It Together: A Buying Workflow

Here's a practical sequence for a regular buying review — weekly or at the start of each ordering season:

Open Inventory Graphs — scan for departments trending low or high relative to prior years
Run Sales → Items for the relevant period last year — compare ending quantities to what you have on hand today
Check On Hand/Order/Sales — note any departments under 2 weeks on hand (urgent) or over 8 weeks (needs attention)
Run Best/Worst Selling for the current season — build your reorder list from the top sellers; flag worst sellers for markdowns
Run Order Planning with your ETA and stock period end date — review the suggested quantities, adjust based on your judgment, and build your POs
Cross-check against Open to Buy — make sure the total dollar commitment fits your inventory budget for the department
Review GMROII — after the season, audit which departments earned well and which tied up cash without results; adjust your strategy for next year