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Weeks On Hand

What the Weeks On Hand Report Tells You

Reports → Ordering → Weeks On Hand

The Weeks On Hand report answers one question for every department: if sales follow the same pattern as last year, how many weeks will the inventory I own right now last?

It is a forward-looking supply check. Instead of just showing you a dollar value on the ground, it projects that value into the coming weeks using your own sales history, so you can see which departments are about to run dry and which are carrying many months of supply.

  • A department showing only a few weeks on hand heading into its peak season needs orders placed now.
  • A department showing a very large number late in its season is over-bought — slow purchasing down or plan markdowns.

How Weeks On Hand Is Calculated

The Weeks On Hand report starts from the cost value of what you own today and "replays" last year's sales against it, week by week:

  1. Starting Cost — the cost value of the department's on-hand inventory as of the report date, for the selected store(s).
  2. Each projected week, the report subtracts the cost of goods sold that the department recorded during the same week one year earlier.
  3. It counts how many weeks pass before the starting cost runs out. That count is the department's Weeks on Hand.

The projection runs up to 52 weeks. A value followed by a plus sign (for example 52+) means the department's inventory did not run out within a year of projected sales.

Because the projection is built from last year's weekly sales, it automatically respects seasonality — a department that sells heavily in spring depletes quickly in the spring weeks of the projection and slowly in winter.

Warning

Departments with little or no sales history in the same weeks last year (new departments, or categories you only started tracking recently) have nothing to subtract, so they show inflated values such as 52+. Judge those departments by other means.

Columns on the Weeks On Hand Report

  • Department — the department being projected. (When viewing By Sub Department, a Sub Department column is added.)
  • Starting Cost — cost value of the on-hand inventory in that department as of the report date, for the selected store(s). Departments with a zero Starting Cost show blank weeks columns.
  • Weeks on Hand — projected number of weeks until the department's inventory runs out at last year's rate of sales. A trailing + means it did not run out within the 52-week projection.
  • 50% Weeks on Hand — projected number of weeks until half of the current inventory is sold through. This is often the more actionable number: it tells you how long your working stock lasts without being skewed by slow tail inventory.

The bottom totals row shows the total Starting Cost across all departments; the weeks columns in the totals row are cost-weighted averages.

Weeks On Hand Report Options

  • Date (in the report sidebar) — run the report as of a past date; the starting cost is reconstructed for that date.
  • All Divisions — shown when your business has more than one sales division; limits the sales history used in the projection to one division.
  • By Department / By Sub Department — group the projection at department level (default) or break each department out by sub department.
  • Store selector (Choose store...) — shown when you have more than one store; select one or more stores to include. Use the Deselect and Select All buttons to change the whole list at once. By default the report shows the store you are signed into.
  • View — run the report with the chosen options.

Click the download icon at the top right of the table to export the results as a CSV file. Column headers are sortable, and the filter row under the headers lets you narrow the table to matching departments.

Some clients have an additional per-client option to project against a sales budget instead of last year's actual sales. This is enabled per-client by VMX — contact help@vmxllc.com if you'd like it.

  • Units Sold by Period (Reports → Ordering) — item-level on-hand and on-order quantities alongside units sold week by week.
  • Order Planning — turns a supply gap into suggested order quantities per item.
  • Inventory Graphs — visualize department inventory levels over time against prior years.