"Why doesn't your forecast match the plan?" is the wrong question.
I've sat in open-to-buy meetings where a plan-versus-forecast delta got treated like someone screwed up. It's backwards. The gap is the job.
Finance builds a budget off company goals and spend. That's the starting line, and it's a good one — somebody has to set the ambition and the envelope.
But planning earns its keep by trying to break that plan. Where are we trending hot? Where are we soft? Where does inventory let us capture the sale, and where does it leave the sale on the table?
What that looks like in practice
In the walkthrough below I go from a corporate view down to category. At the top line everything looks fine — nothing that would trip an alarm in a finance review.
Drill into a single category and a constrained-versus-unconstrained gap opens up. An inventory outage in one place. A lead-time wall in another, where you physically cannot get receipts in by the week you need them.
That's not a forecast to argue with. That's a map. What do we chase? What do we push in its place? Where do we fund receipts because the trend is real and the inventory is the only thing standing in the way?
The question leadership should be asking
"I don't believe your forecast" ends the conversation and teaches the planning team to submit numbers that agree with the budget. You will get the plan you asked for, and you will find out what was really happening in the business about a quarter too late.
That version of the question treats the gap as information rather than as an error, and it's the difference between a planning function that protects the business and one that just reports on it.
Is your OTB meeting an argument or a read?
Building the constrained-versus-unconstrained view is a standard part of an engagement. Half an hour is usually enough to tell whether it would help.
Book a 30-minute call