LIM College

Today I worked on building projections off a list I ran in Micro-strategy. What I had to do first was make projections for Spring 12 based on Spring 11 actual sales. The first step was to sort the data. I sorted it out by Accessories total sales and Ready to Wear (RTW) total sales.

Then I would total up the grand total of sales for Contemporary. (Within Contemporary there are two classifications, Accessories and RTW, which is why I highlighted certain rows in pink, so I could add up the total for the Accessories classification and minus it from the grand total to get RTW total sales). After I did this, as you can see below, I highlighted the two columns in purple that I would be using in the next tab to project out Spring 12 sales.

Below you can see that I took data from the last Excel document and put it in the first two columns of the Excel worksheet. After that I added columns to see how I would project out my Spring 12 sales.

I made a % to total Accessories where I would divide the pink highlighted rows (which are Accessories) by the Accessories total to see how much percent of the business they do in sales for that department. Then I would do the same, except for RTW and Accessories I would divide them all into the total Contemporary sales of Accessories and RTW combined. This would then give me my percent to total Contemporary.

After I completed finding out how much of the business was Accessories and how much was RTW, I then decided how much I wanted to increase Accessories based on our past trend. I increased Accessories by 5.0%, making RTW 95.0% of the business.

After I completed finding out the numbers for these two departments I distributed how much I wanted to increase each department in Accessories, making sure it totaled 100%.

There are some key things you want to take into consideration -- for example, 50% of the Accessories business is in men’s bags, so you may keep the increase by 50% but the dollar amount can sometimes be too high of a goal, so then you can reduce it by a few to make sure the dollar amount seems reasonable.

So I finally learned how to start to make basic projections based on a little bit of information. =)