Demand Planner is Brightpearl's forecasting tool, using past sales velocity, current stock, and lead times to recommend what to reorder and when, aiming to replace the reorder math a lot of retailers still build by hand in a spreadsheet. It's genuinely useful for the data it has. The gap is everything it doesn't have, a supplier's actual lead time this quarter, a planned promotion, a channel-specific demand spike, and that's where we connect it to the rest of your business.
Demand Planner looks at historical order velocity for each product, factors in current stock and typical supplier lead times, and surfaces a suggested reorder quantity and timing, across locations if you're running more than one. The goal is the same one a manual reorder spreadsheet is usually trying to solve: order enough before you run out, without tying up cash in stock that sits too long.
Because it runs on Brightpearl's own order history, it's working from real sales data rather than a guess, which is already an improvement over a static reorder point that never adjusts for a product's actual seasonality or trend.
A supplier's lead time changes, a new factory, a shipping delay, a different minimum order quantity negotiated last month, and Demand Planner keeps using whatever lead time it was last told, not what's actually true right now. A planned promotion or a known seasonal spike that hasn't happened yet in the sales history doesn't show up in a purely historical forecast either, which means the suggested reorder quantity can be right for last year and wrong for what's about to happen.
Multi-channel demand is another blind spot if some of your sales history sits outside Brightpearl, a marketplace or storefront that feeds in with a lag, or doesn't feed in at all. Demand Planner can only forecast off the sales it can actually see.
Actual current lead times from a supplier portal or a shared tracking sheet feed into the reorder calculation, so the suggested timing reflects what's really happening with that supplier right now, not what it was months ago.
A planned promotion or a known seasonal event adjusts the forecast ahead of time instead of waiting for the sales history to catch up with it after the fact.
A supplier's real lead time, a channel outside Brightpearl, a planned promotion, tell us what's missing from the forecast and we'll look at feeding it in.
Tell us what you're correcting every time, a lead time, a promotion, a channel it doesn't see, and we'll look at building that into the forecast directly. And if reordering isn't where the real friction is in your business, that's fine too, we'll look at what is.
Let's talk →It's Brightpearl's built-in forecasting tool, using historical sales velocity, current stock, and supplier lead times to suggest what to reorder and when, instead of relying on a manually maintained reorder point or spreadsheet.
It works from historical sales patterns, so a recurring seasonal trend that already shows up in past data gets factored in. A new promotion or a seasonal push that hasn't happened before isn't something a purely historical forecast can anticipate on its own.
Yes, it can forecast per location if you're running more than one, which matters for a retailer where demand and lead times genuinely differ by warehouse rather than being the same number applied everywhere.
Demand Planner uses whatever lead time and order terms it was set up with. If a supplier's real lead time, minimum order quantity, or cost has changed since then, the suggestion is still working off the older numbers until someone updates them.