Fair questions, straight answers.

Sometimes, and then we say so. But we don’t sell forecasting. The forecast is one of five things that can go wrong before a best seller runs out. The others: the lead time the planner uses versus the one you actually get, the promotion nobody told the planner about, stock sitting in the wrong channel, and units that arrived but aren’t yet sellable. The diagnostic tests each against your last year of orders, so the fix lands on the one that caused the misses.

Keep it. A good planner (Inventory Planner, Cogsy, Prediko, Flieber and others) does the arithmetic well when the data underneath is coherent. What it can’t do is own its inputs: whether the counts are true, whether lead times reflect reality, whether the reorder it recommends is what actually gets ordered, and how units split across Amazon, your store and wholesale. That layer around the planner is where we work, and where most misses come from.

No. When a proven tool fits, we say so and help you adopt it, and take nothing from the vendor. Independence is the point of the recommendation.

The ones you already run. Shopify and other storefronts, Amazon (FBA, AWD, FBM) and other marketplaces, wholesale and retailer orders, your 3PL’s portal or warehouse system, your planner, and NetSuite, Cin7 or QuickBooks. If it has an export or an API, it can be in the diagnostic. If it only has a spreadsheet, that counts too.

Sometimes you should, and we’ll say so. Those products keep one master count in sync across channels. Our work starts after that: the software is installed and someone still spends every morning reconciling numbers by hand. What survives the purchase is business-specific (your policies, your contracts, your warehouse’s habits), and no off-the-shelf product ships it.

No. We work beside the systems you run, read-only during an audit. A common outcome is fixing the configuration of software you already pay for. If a system genuinely needs replacing, that’s a recommendation you can take to any vendor, not a project we push.

No. We’re a small practice, not a product. We diagnose where an operation leaks money or hours, fix what’s worth fixing, and maintain what we build. Nothing to subscribe to.

You get a plain-language findings report you own outright, each leak quantified and traced to its cause. Then it’s your call: your own team, another vendor, or us. The audit stands on its own either way.

No. An audit that always recommends a build shouldn’t be trusted. The honest order: do nothing where a difference is normal, fix settings in software you own, fix the process, take the evidence to your warehouse or vendor, and only then build the piece that’s genuinely missing. In our worked sample, two of three recommendations aren’t software at all.

Then that’s the finding. The audit traces each discrepancy to specific orders, units and timestamps, which turns “our 3PL’s numbers are always wrong” into “here are the exact cases where the handoff failed.” That evidence is useful in a vendor conversation whether or not we build anything.

Two ways. The diagnosis runs on your actual transactions, not interviews, so findings come with specific orders and dollar amounts attached. And the engagement ends in something that runs: a fix built, monitored and maintained, not a slide deck.