The Commercial Toolkit
The number most teams report is not the number that decides
Five tools for the decisions that move a retail P&L. Each takes the data you already have and returns a decision, an owner and the money behind it. Free to download, no form.
tools
method
forms
How to use them
Give away the calculation. Keep the judgement.
Read in order, the five follow the commercial year: plan it, watch it, stock it, promote it, fund it. Each one can be used on its own.
All five work the same way. Every line carries money. Every finding answers What? So what? Now what?, and names the person who owns the decision. Checks say FAIL rather than producing a confident answer from bad data. Estimates are labelled as estimates, and each tool says plainly what it does not do. The sample figures belong to a fictional retailer.
The workbook recommends; the business decides.
Plan the year
The Ecommerce Budget Builder
What should we plan to sell, and what will it cost?
The problem
Last year plus a growth rate.
What the tool does
Builds the plan week by week from traffic, conversion, basket and returns, with every cost and the gap to target.
Watch it
The Ecommerce KPI Framework
Are we measuring the right things, and who acts when they move?
The problem
Forty metrics on a dashboard, and nobody owns most of them.
What the tool does
Keeps only the metrics that drive a decision, each with an owner, a threshold and an action.
Stock it
Availability and Stock Intelligence
Is the stock we hold a decision, or a report?
The problem
Stock reports count units, not what customers can buy.
What the tool does
Shows availability by size, and ranks every line by lost sales, markdown and cash.
Promote it
Promotion Economics
Will the discount pay, and afterwards, did it make money or merely move it?
The problem
Every function claims the promotion’s sales.
What the tool does
Tests whether a discount can pay before the event, and whether it made money after.
Fund it
Contribution and Media Efficiency
Does the last pound of media pay?
The problem
ROAS credits campaigns with sales they did not cause.
What the tool does
Judges each campaign on the contribution it caused, and on what the last pound earns.
Before the numbers
Three self-assessments
The toolkit works on your data. The self-assessments work on your judgement: thirty-six readiness checks, twenty-one AI checks and a pre-peak checklist, each answered in your browser and kept there.
Or have it read
The tools do the arithmetic. Deciding what to do about it, in your business, with your team, is the work Barking Cat does.