What's Coming lists the holidays and shopping events in the weeks and months ahead, and shows what each one has done to your sales before. Most calendars stop at "December is busy". This screen gives the size of the effect, for example Black Friday 2.90× (2 yrs), meaning your sales on Black Friday have typically been nearly three times an ordinary Friday's.
The dates come from the calendar. The size of each effect comes only from your own sales history, because the same event can be huge for one business and invisible for another. Prime Day can matter a great deal to a consumer-goods seller on Amazon and hardly at all to a trade supplier. An event you have seen in only one year is listed with its dates but no size, because one year is not enough to go on.
Open it with Forecast ▸ What's Coming (Alt+O opens the Forecast menu).
Using the screen
- Open Forecast ▸ What's Coming.
- Under Looking ahead, choose 60 days, 120 days (the default) or a year.
- Read down the list. It is in date order, earliest first.
- Look at EFFECT HERE for the events that matter to you. A green figure above 1× is a busier-than-normal period. A red figure below 1× is a quieter one.
- Act on it. Check Reorder Levels and, for Amazon sellers, Ship to Amazon well before a big event. The dates on those screens already include these effects.
- Use Export above the table to save the list as CSV, Excel or PDF.
The columns
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| EVENT | The holiday or shopping event. |
| STARTS | The first day of the event. Events that last several days, such as Christmas trading, are shown as a range. |
| ENDS | The last day of the event. For a single day, this is the same as STARTS. |
| DAYS AWAY | Days from today until the event starts. A negative number means the event has already started and is still running. |
| EFFECT HERE | How your sales on those days compared with ordinary days, followed by the number of years it is measured from, for example 1.45× (3 yrs). — not seen enough means the event has been seen in fewer than two years of your history, so no size is claimed. |
| BASED ON | Either measured from this business's own history or no history for this event yet — date only, no size claimed. |
Each event appears once, at its next occurrence. Click a column heading to sort by it. When the list has eight or more rows, Search this list… filters it.
Reading EFFECT HERE
| Figure | Meaning | Colour |
|---|---|---|
| Above about 1.08× | Sales on these days have typically been higher than normal. 2.00× means about double. | Green |
| About 0.92× to 1.08× | No real difference from an ordinary day. | Grey |
| Below about 0.92× | Sales have typically been lower. 0.50× means about half. | Red |
| — not seen enough | Fewer than two years of this event in your history. | Grey |
A measured 1.00× is a finding that the event made no difference. — not seen enough means it has not been measured yet, which is a different thing.
How the effect is measured
For every day of an event in your history, SeroBooks compares that day's sales with what an ordinary day of the same weekday would have been. The ordinary day is based on the middle value of the four weeks around it, adjusted for your weekly pattern. Black Friday is therefore compared with a normal Friday, not with a quiet Monday. The effect shown is the middle value of those comparisons across all the years the event has been seen. Effects are limited to between 0.1× and 6×.
SeroBooks measures effects on your total sales before tax: invoices and sales receipts plus, for Amazon sellers, Amazon orders. An event needs to appear in at least two different years before a size is shown. Until the business has about four weeks of sales history, an amber note says Not enough trading history to know what these events do here. The dates are still listed.
The Forecast uses these same effects. On a day inside a measured event, the forecast for every item is multiplied by the event's effect. Where two events overlap, for example Labour Day inside Back to school, the forecast uses whichever effect is further from normal. The Forecast screen's N events learned counts the events seen in at least two years that changed sales by 10% or more.
The events
| Event | Dates |
|---|---|
| New Year's Day | 1 January |
| the January lull | 2 to 20 January |
| Valentine's Day | 10 to 14 February |
| Good Friday | The Friday before Easter Sunday |
| Mother's Day week | The six days before Mother's Day (second Sunday in May) and the day itself |
| Victoria Day | The Monday before 25 May |
| Canada Day | 1 July |
| Prime Day (July) | 8 to 18 July |
| Back to school | 15 August to 8 September |
| Labour Day | First Monday in September |
| Prime Big Deal Days (October) | 6 to 16 October |
| Thanksgiving (CA) | Second Monday in October |
| Remembrance Day | 11 November |
| Black Friday week | Monday to Thursday before Black Friday |
| Black Friday | The day after US Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November) |
| Cyber Monday | The Monday after Black Friday |
| Christmas trading | 10 to 23 December |
| Christmas Day | 25 December |
| Boxing Week | 26 to 31 December |
Amazon announces its sale dates only a few weeks ahead, so Prime Day and Prime Big Deal Days are shown as windows around their usual dates. Christmas trading covers the two weeks before Christmas, when the sales happen, rather than Christmas Day itself. The public holidays follow your company's country, taken from its first location. A Canadian company sees the Canadian statutory holidays in the table above (Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving (CA) and Remembrance Day); provincial holidays such as Family Day are not included.
A company in the United States sees the US federal holidays instead: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (third Monday in January), Presidents' Day (third Monday in February), Memorial Day (last Monday in May), Juneteenth (19 June), Independence Day (4 July), Labor Day (first Monday in September), Columbus Day (second Monday in October), Veterans Day (11 November) and Thanksgiving (US) (fourth Thursday in November). The shopping events, such as Black Friday, Prime Day and Christmas trading, are the same in both countries.
Permissions
Your role needs access to the Forecast module and the same access as the accounting reports. Without it, the screen shows You do not have permission for this. Ask an administrator to grant it under Users & Roles.
Tips
- Choose a year once a quarter to plan big seasonal buys, especially if your supplier lead times are long.
- Import-heavy businesses should look further ahead than the event. With a 90-day supplier lead time, a Black Friday peak has to be ordered by late August.
- A red effect is useful too. The January lull tells you not to reorder heavily at the end of December.
Common problems
| Problem | What to do |
|---|---|
| Every event shows — not seen enough. | Your history covers less than two occurrences of each event. Sizes appear once events have been seen in two different years. |
| An amber note says there is not enough trading history. | The business has less than about four weeks of sales in SeroBooks. The dates are still correct. The effects follow as history builds. |
| The effect looks wrong for your business. | The effect is a middle value across years. A year with a one-off promotion or a stock shortage during the event pulls it up or down. It improves as more years are seen. |
| An event you care about is not listed. | Only the events in the table above are tracked. |