Account Planner (Volume and Trade Funds Planning Tool)
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The Account Planner is designed to help CPG organizations manage one of the most significant elements of their go-to-market approach, trade spending. Many companies spend a large portion of their overall brand support budget on trade spending. Yet most organizations have great difficulty planning, tracking, and evaluating their trade funds spending, let alone know if that investment is driving their business. Account Planner also aids organizations in developing annual volume forecasts and providing management with ongoing (e.g., monthly) field level updates to use as input to the overall volume forecasting process.
The Account Planner is a PC-based application that will help you address these issues. Field sales is provided baseline sales volume for building a total sales, trade spending and promotional plan customized for their account. Promotion simulation is accomplished through the use of syndicated lift factors. This data can be supplemented with optional sophisticated price and promotion analysis to build a powerful lift factor model based on retail conditions and pricing, which significantly enhances promotion simulation accuracy.
Plan templates are customized to your product and customer hierarchies, allowing plans to be developed at any desired level. Account Planner also automatically updates the sales volume data that is used to populate the planning templates.
Completed plans can be aggregated at any desired level (by region, division, in total, etc.) to give management an overview of planned sales volume, product mix promotional activities and trade spending. Plans can be updated during the plan year through ongoing use of the template, which is automatically updated with actual results for completed periods and contains editable plan data for the balance of the year.
This tool is customized to meet the specific needs of your organization’s unique planning process, promotion strategy, and category dynamics.
Account Planner leverages your current investment in PCs and Microsoft Office and taps into powerful features in the Microsoft Office suite that few take advantage of. The Account Planner is part of the DHC Planning and Reporting Suite, which includes Sales Reporting Plus and Administration (Admin) Tools.
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Application Package Includes:
Account Level Plan Templates
Plan Rollup Engine and Reporting tool
Admin tool (to create and aggregate templates)
Minimum Operating System Requirements:
Windows XP
Microsoft Office 2003 (Full Excel load required)
800 MHz processor
256 MB of memory (1 GB recommended)
Internet access for updates
150 MB of free disk space for planning two or fewer accounts.