Margin per Stocked Day

Reports → Inventory → Margin per Stocked Day ranks every item by the profit it produced per day it occupied space, seasonally adjusted — and flags the worst performers. It answers a question no other report does directly: which items are tying up shelf space and inventory dollars without earning their keep?

On some stores this report also requires the See Sensitive Numbers employee permission, since it is built entirely from margin data.

How the metric works

For each item, VMX takes the margin it earned over the analysis window (using final selling prices, so discounts, returns, and voids are all accounted for), subtracts the window's shrink — dead plants, damage, count-down adjustments from the adjustments ledger, valued at cost — and divides by its stocked days: the days the item actually sat in stock, from its first sale in the window through today (or through its last sale, if it's now sold out). Stocked days are an approximation, but the point is what they punish: an item that sold three times across ten months of shelf time scores low, exactly as it should. And because shrink is in the numerator, a plant that sells fine but loses a third of every batch on the bench scores low too.

Each month's margin is seasonally adjusted against the department's own pattern: margin earned in a naturally slow month counts for more, peak-month margin counts for less. A perennial that goes quiet in January isn't penalized for winter.

Items in the worst slice of the ranking (default: the worst 5%) are flagged.

The supporting columns

Weeks of Supply — on-hand quantity at the window's weekly sales pace, shown red at 26+ weeks. This is the urgency signal: a flagged item with a year's supply needs action now; one with three weeks of supply will solve itself.
Sell-Thru % — units sold versus units received in the window. Persistently low sell-through is the classic first sign an item is over-bought.
Shrink $ — the window's net adjustment cost for the item (negative means value lost to death, damage, or count-downs).
GMROI — the window's margin against the dollars currently sitting in the item, in the same return-on-inventory language as the GMROII report.

Suggested Action

Each item that is flagged — or that earns less per stocked day than its own daily carrying cost (using the standard 25%-per-year carrying assumption on its on-hand value) — gets a rule-based suggestion:

Suggestion	When
Investigate	Margin for the window is negative — usually a pricing or cost error, or heavy returns, rather than a bad item.
Markdown	26+ weeks of supply and the department's season is past its peak — waiting only loses more value.
Reduce orders	8+ weeks of supply (or the season is still building) — keep selling, but restock shallower.
Let sell out	Under 8 weeks of supply — no action needed beyond not reordering deeply.

These are suggestions, not verdicts — first-season items and loss-leaders deserve judgment before action.

Running the report

Store — analyze one store's sales and on-hand, or all stores together (multi-store only).
Departments — limit to the departments you're reviewing; all when none selected.
Analyze N mo — the window the ranking is computed over (default 12 months).
Baseline N mo — how much history builds the seasonal pattern (default 24 months; longer is steadier).
Flag worst N % — how deep to flag (default 5%).

Click Go to re-run with your settings.

Reading the results

The summary tiles show items analyzed, items flagged, the flagged items' total margin for the window, and Inventory $ at risk — the on-hand value currently sitting in flagged items. That last number is usually the one worth acting on.

Below the tiles:

Items by adj. margin/stocked day — how your catalog distributes across performance buckets, flagged portion in red.
Cumulative margin (Pareto) — how few items produce most of your margin.
Performance vs volume — every item plotted by quantity sold against adjusted margin per stocked day, bubble size showing the inventory dollars on hand. The interesting quadrant is high-volume/low-margin: items that feel like winners because they move, but earn little for the space. Click any point to open that item's page.
Departments — where the flagged items and at-risk dollars concentrate, with the Summary by Department table below it.

The Items table holds every analyzed item, filtered to Status: Flagged by default and sorted worst first: on-hand and its dollar value, stocked vs. selling days, quantity sold, margin for the window, and the adjusted margin per stocked day. Every PLU links to its item page.

The charts drill into the table. Click a bar in Items by adj. margin/stocked day and the table filters to that cohort (all statuses); click a department bar — or a row in the Summary by Department table under it — and it filters to that department's flagged items. Use reset filters next to the table heading to get back to the default view, the column filter boxes to narrow further, and the CSV button to export exactly what's currently shown.

What to do with a flagged item

Markdown — clear it and free the space and dollars.
Reduce future orders — keep it, but stop restocking at the old depth.
Discontinue — set the item's status so Order Planning stops suggesting it.
Investigate — a negative margin per day often means a cost or pricing error rather than a genuinely bad item.

Two cautions: items in their first season have little history and can be flagged unfairly, and items whose value shows up elsewhere (loss leaders, service-attached goods) deserve judgment before action.

GMROII — the classic margin-return-on-inventory view, at department level.
Weeks On Hand — how long current stock will last at the current sales pace.
Items Not Selling — the simpler no-sales view, without margin weighting.