Next year's budget, this year's numbers

April is when next year quietly gets decided: master schedules, budget requests, room assignments. A store with a year of real numbers walks into that season holding something most requests don’t have: evidence. Here’s how to turn this year’s data into next fall’s plan, in one crew work session plus one advisor memo.

Pull the year’s four planning numbers

From the fall and spring records (the semester one-pagers make this a 15-minute job):

1. The run rate: average weekly sales, split by semester. This is the baseline every projection hangs on.
2. The shape: the seasonality curve: the August ramp, the November peak, the February dip, the spring-event spikes. Next year’s calendar will rhyme. (The fall half of the shape, annotated, is in the semester-close post.)
3. The winners’ list: top sellers by units and margin, with the size curves from every drop.
4. The capacity ceiling: the weeks demand outran you (stock-outs, line length, shifts you couldn’t cover). The ceiling is where growth money should point.

Size the fall PO from the curve, in three scenarios

First-drop sizing stops being a guess the second year. Take last August-through-October’s actual sell-through, then draft three versions with the crew:

• Base: last fall’s volume, corrected for known misses (order the stock-out sizes properly this time).
• Growth: base plus a deliberate bet, funded by evidence (“hoodies sold out twice; we’re adding 25% to hoodies, not to everything”).
• Lean: the budget-cut version that protects the winners’ list and drops the bottom quartile entirely.

The three-scenario habit is the teaching move: real businesses budget in ranges, and a crew that’s argued Base-versus-Growth in April understands the fall assortment as a set of decisions, not a shipment that happens to them.

Run your own numbers through the three scenarios:

Practical calendar note while you’re in there: get fall PO quotes now. Your printer’s August is chaos, spring quotes hold better prices, and a June-placed order beats an August-begged one by weeks.

Build the equipment ask on the capacity math

Whatever your store needs next (a second register for the rush, a real drawer, display fixtures, the platform upgrade conversation), April is the season to ask, and the capacity ceiling is the argument. The form that works:

The line that costs us: “At peak we run one register and the line caps at what one operator can ring; we counted [N] walkaways during November rush weeks.” The fix and its price: the specific item, the real quote. The payback math: conservative recovered sales against the cost, in months. (“If a second station recovers half the walkaway weeks’ gap, it pays back by December.”)

Attach the year-end one-pagers as exhibits. A request with a payback period and evidence reads like an investment; a request without them reads like a wish, and budget season is unkind to wishes.

Bank the plan where September can find it

End the session by writing the one-page fall plan: the sales goal by semester (from run rate plus the growth bet), the first-PO scenario chosen, the drop calendar sketched against the seasonality curve, and the equipment ask’s status. File it with the store binder, next to the succession doc (next month’s post) so the plan and the people transfer together.

The crews that own this document in April have the calmest Augusts, and their advisors write the shortest memos, because the numbers already made the case.

The one-page version

• Pull four numbers: run rate, seasonality shape, winners’ list, capacity ceiling.
• Draft the fall PO three ways: base, growth (evidence-funded), lean.
• Quote the fall order now; place it in June.
• Equipment asks ride the capacity math: the line that costs, the fix, the payback.
• One-page fall plan, filed where September’s crew will find it.

This year’s numbers already tell you what next year should look like; April is when you write it down.