How smarter inventory planning eliminates the weekly “where is my inventory?” meeting

Every multi-channel brand knows that meeting. It happens weekly. You dread it. The ops, sales, and finance teams have blocked off three hours to “review inventory.”

Everyone shows up with a different spreadsheet.
The warehouse report doesn’t match Shopify.
Wholesale needs to ship to their top 3 accounts.
DTC has a big launch next week.
And now, everyone is trying to figure out who gets the last 400 mediums.

First, the team has to unwind fake wholesale orders in the WMS. Then they have to figure out which reserves in Shopify are for group orders vs presale orders vs QC issues. A dozen columns worth of manual updates in a spreadsheet end with a promise to have a clean inventory picture next week. 

Finally, the team has hacked together a reactive game plan for splitting up the units that feels more like living to fight another day.

The truth? You’re not doing anything wrong.
Your systems aren’t supporting you.

The Real Problem with Inventory Systems

Most inventory systems were built to track where stock physically lives, not how it should be used strategically.They see one pool of 10,000 units sitting in a warehouse, but they don’t understand that 5,000 are meant to support e-commerce initiatives, 2,000 for wholesale, 1,000 for Amazon, and 2,000 for your owned retail stores.

As soon as you add multiple channels, that lack of virtual segmentation creates inventory conflict. Who gets what? When? Based on what priority?

Without a clear segmentation layer, every brand ends up solving the same problem in the same painful way:

• Half-day weekly meetings on allocation decisions
• Manual reconciliation across reports and systems
• Fake orders or “phantom holds” to reserve inventory
• Slack firefights every time someone oversells a SKU
• Ad-hoc huddles to figure out which inventory number is right

Sound familiar?

The Smarter Way: Segment Before It Lands

High-performing brands don’t wait until inventory arrives to make these decisions. They segment inventory upstream, before a single box hits the dock.

It’s not about overcomplicating planning. It’s about having clarity and alignment as far upstream as possible. By deciding up front what portion of each Purchase Order is for e-commerce, owned retail stores, wholesale, and marketplaces, every team knows their share before the product even arrives.

That means:

• The warehouse can just receive and ship.
• Everyone can breathe easy knowing another channel won’t swipe their units.
• Operations can clearly track landed costs by channel.
• Leadership can see true profitability across the business without manual guesswork.

And, like most plans, they go right out the window as soon as the season begins.

When priorities inevitably shift mid-season, you can still move inventory between segments just-in-time as demand arrives in-season. 

The key is starting with structure, not reacting with spreadsheets.

How GoodDay Makes It Effortless

With most legacy ERP systems, you’d need heavy customization or manual hacks to make any of this work. At Chubbies, we spent 12+ months building these custom flows. 

GoodDay was built differently: inventory segmentation is native, not hacked together.

Here’s what that unlocks:

1. Virtual Segmentation Out of the Box
A warehouse might show 100 total units, but GoodDay automatically manages that as 50 e-commerce, 30 owned retail stores, 10 wholesale, 10 Amazon. The warehouse doesn’t need to be organized differently; GoodDay handles it virtually.

2. Split-Channel Purchase Orders
Easily split inbound shipments by channel…air-freight wholesale units to deliver early, and boat-ship DTC units to save costs…all while tracking landed costs and margins separately at the line item level.

3. Automated Reconciliation & Waterfall Logic
Every night, GoodDay compares actuals against the warehouse and automatically adjusts shortages based on your channel priorities. If 10 units go missing, the system deducts from the lowest-priority channel first. No manual clean-up. No meeting needed. And proactive alerting to those deductions so any fall out isn’t left to be found in the 11th hour.

4. Real-Time Transfers Between Channels
Need to reallocate inventory? Just initiate a virtual transfer. It’s instant, synced across to Shopify if impacting e-commerce, and fully traceable through the GoodDay ledger.

5. From Meetings to Minutes
One brand we worked with was running on NetSuite. Their team spent nearly a full day each week pulling reports, debating allocations, and updating fake orders to manage inventory across their sales channels.  After implementing GoodDay, they plan segmentation up-front, automate daily reconciliation, and handle adjustments asynchronously. Quick Slack approvals, 30-minute check-ins, more work done.

Why It Matters

Inventory segmentation isn’t just about control. It’s about speed, focus, and trust.

When every channel knows the inputs and expected outputs of their channel, new product launches run smoother, retail partners stay happy, and your team can finally move from firefighting to operating proactively.

That’s the GoodDay way: Plan upstream. Automate the rest. Operate in flow.