SOLUTIONS
Merchandise Financial Planning for Wholesale
Align inventory investments with financial goals
PartnerLinQ's Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) for Wholesale is the strategic control center that ensures your wholesale investments are profitable, predictable, and compliant with customer commitments. We eliminate the risk of over- or under-investment by providing a unified, financially disciplined view across your entire B2B business.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core capability pillars:
B2B Focus
Specifically designed to manage complex wholesale scenarios, including managing partner terms and tracking Inventory Turnover across B2B channels and regions.
Integrated Control
Unifies financial targets with customer agreements and inventory strategy, eliminating the "siloed planning" challenge.
Agentic AI Services
Leverage ML to run supply/demand scenario comparisons across versions and dynamically calculate the impact of changing wholesale orders on buffer health.
Dynamic Planning
Supports continuous planning by facilitating the reconciliation of financial variances throughout the selling season.
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides the essential features for granular financial control, high-fidelity forecasting, and transparent reconciliation in the wholesale environment.
Channel/Customer Guardrails: Define and enforce strict budget guardrails at the channel or customer level, protecting the integrity of the total merchandise budget.
Integrated Targets: Link top-line sales, margin, and inventory targets directly to tactical customer commitments and unit plans.
Reconciliation & Variance Tracking: Tools to reconcile financial variances and planned budgets against actual order commitments and sales performance throughout the season.
Markdown & Discount Modeling: Model the financial impact of anticipated markdown and discount impacts by partner or channel, ensuring Gross Margin targets are protected.
Hierarchy Alignment: Define flexible hierarchies by channel, customer, market, or category to structure the financial plan according to your wholesale selling strategy.
Scenario Comparison: Run and compare multiple budget scenarios (e.g., 'Target', 'Best Case', 'Worst Case') to assess financial risk exposure under different wholesale ordering patterns.
Pre-Season vs. In-Season Views: Maintain separate, yet linked, views for pre-season budgets (strategic investment) and in-season adjustments (reactive control) for comprehensive visibility.
Key Metric Monitoring: Monitor and report on core wholesale financial KPIs, including Gross Margin %, Inventory Turnover, Markdown %, and Budget Adherence %.
Customer Agreement Visibility: Provide full transparency into how customer agreements and specific terms affect the overall financial budget.
Forecast Validation: Track the Forecast Accuracy % used in the financial projections to ensure confidence in the underlying plan.
Technology
A solution's technology vision must align with your organization’s future aspirations. PartnerLinQ’s modern, composable architecture ensures a planning solution that is not only powerful today but will scale to meet your evolving needs.
Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud Architecture: Our scalable, cloud-native architecture is built for demand planning cycles, ensuring fast processing and seamless performance. We support multi-cloud environments, providing the flexibility to align with your organization’s cloud strategy.
Composability: Built on an API-first and microservices architecture, our platform provides the extensibility and flexibility to adapt to your unique needs, helping you achieve a truly composable enterprise.
Intelligent Data Applications Framework: Our framework allows you to easily onboard and enrich external data sets and factors with AI-based predictions, creating a richer input signal for your demand planning process and accelerating the evolution of your digital intelligence with ease
Extensive Prebuilt Adapters: We offer prebuilt, composable integration adapters for over 80 enterprise application platforms, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, Manhattan Active Omni and Salesforce.
Seamless Data Flow: Our bi-directional integration capabilities with ERP, POS, Online Commerce, and WMS systems ensure a continuous flow of demand data for a single source of truth.
Trading Partner Network: Our native integration with your trading partner network allows for real-time data capture, ensuring your plans are always informed by the most current market signals.
Custom Algorithm & Model Development: The platform provides a unified environment for in-house development of custom algorithms and models, giving your teams the tools to continuously evolve the solution.
Industry Knowledge Graph and Data Models: ParnterLinQ’s industry data models and supply chain knowledge graph instantly enable out of the box reporting, search and planning capabilities to a whole new level of sophistication and extensibility.
Third-Party Analytic Integration: Easily integrate third-party analytics and leverage public APIs to expand the planning models and connect with external data sources.
User Experience
The Wholesale MFP user experience is designed for high collaboration, transparent adjustment, and quick decision-making, moving teams beyond static spreadsheets.
Consolidated Workbooks: Utilize shared workbooks that present financial targets, customer order commitments, and variance alerts in a single, transparent interface.
Role-Based Access: Budget guardrails and approval rights are managed via role-based access, ensuring Sales can view targets while Finance controls the adjustment of limits.
Adjustment Flexibility: Planners can easily input and view in-season adjustments by unit, value, or percentage, with clear audit trails showing who made the change.
Variance Narratives (AI): Generative AI provides context by explaining the root cause of financial variances (e.g., "Budget Adherence % decline due to increased Q4 discount rate for Key Account X").
Quick Toggles: Use smart actions to instantly view the impact of a proposed adjustment on Gross Margin % or Inventory Turnover.
Implementation Advantage
Our implementation focuses on rapid configuration of your specific B2B financial and commercial hierarchies to drive immediate value and financial control.
Agile Hierarchy Setup: Rapidly configure the financial planning hierarchy based on your specific channels, customers, and product categories, ensuring the plan maps to your organizational structure.
Financial System Integration: Streamline the connection to your ERP and financial systems to ingest COGS, GL data, and actual sales, powering accurate reconciliation and variance analysis.
B2B Rule Configuration: Quickly define and implement logic for managing markdown and discount impacts specific to various wholesale partners and markets.
Compliance Ready: Establish and enforce budget guardrails and approval workflows from day one, ensuring financial compliance and auditability across all wholesale commitments.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s Wholesale MFP solution delivers strategic financial clarity, empowering brands to achieve scalable growth without sacrificing profitability.
Protected Profitability: Achieves a higher, more predictable Gross Margin % by actively modeling and controlling the impact of discounts and markdowns.
Reduced Risk: Lowers the risk of making unbudgeted commitments to customers by enforcing budget guardrails at the channel or customer level.
Strategic Alignment: Ensures the entire organization is aligned to a single, reconciled set of sales, margin, and inventory targets, minimizing internal conflict over inventory allocation.
Optimized Cash Flow: Better management of working capital, reflected by a healthier Inventory Turnover rate and improved adherence to financial plans (Budget Adherence %).
Pricing Model
PartnerLinQ provides overall business value and industry-specific intelligent planning technology and solutions for both current and future needs. We offer a simplified pricing model that provides predictability and transparency, empowering your business to invest with confidence.
Tiered, Usage-Based Pricing: Our model is simple and transparent. You only pay for the tier that matches your actual usage each month, so you are only ever paying for what you use.
Simplified Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): By consolidating all key functions into a single, usage-based model, we eliminate the hidden costs of managing multiple vendors and disparate systems, ensuring your investment delivers both immediate and sustainable
Unified & Transparent Cost: Our unified pricing covers all core capabilities—including integration, data processing, the planning applications, and the embedded AI—eliminating hidden costs.
PartnerLinQ gives you the precision, agility, and control to turn seasonal volatility into a competitive advantage.
Contact us to schedule a demo and see the difference.
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