WSSIWeekly Sales, Stock and Intake

WSSI stands for Weekly Sales, Stock and Intake. It's the merchandiser's central control document — a week-by-week view of three things across a season: what you sold, what stock you're holding, and what intake is landing.

The point of a WSSI is to hold plan and actual side by side. You set a plan before the season starts, and every week you compare what actually happened against it. The gaps are where the decisions live.

It's the single document that ties together the rest of the merchandising plan. The range plan feeds the buy, the buy feeds intake, intake feeds stock, and stock plus rate of sale drives the sales line. The WSSI is where all of that meets and gets reconciled, week after week.

What's in a WSSI

A WSSI is a grid: weeks across the top, metrics down the side. For each week it carries both planned and actual figures for:

• Sales — units and value sold that week
• Stock — closing stock at the end of the week, usually at cost and at retail
• Intake — stock receipted in that week from open orders
• Markdown — any markdown taken, which pulls value out of stock

From those, the WSSI derives the numbers merchandisers actually trade on:

• Sell-through rate — how fast the season's stock is clearing
• Weeks of cover — how long current stock lasts at the current rate of sale
• Forward cover — whether you have enough stock landing to hit the plan

Why the weekly trading review runs on it

The WSSI is the agenda for the weekly trade meeting. The format forces the right questions:

• Sales ahead of plan but cover thin? You need to chase intake or you'll run out mid-season.
• Sales behind plan and stock piling up? You're heading into markdown unless you act now.
• Intake slipped a week? Every downstream week shifts, and the cover position changes with it.

Because the document spans the whole season, it lets you see the consequence of this week's position on weeks 8, 12, and 16 — not just today. That forward view is what separates trading from reacting.

Why the Excel version breaks

Almost every brand starts with a WSSI in a spreadsheet. It works until it doesn't, and the failure modes are predictable:

• Linked tabs. A real WSSI is dozens of interlinked tabs — one per department or channel, rolling up to a total. One broken link, one inserted row, and the totals silently go wrong. Nobody notices until the numbers don't tie.
• Version chaos. The file gets emailed around, copied, renamed WSSI_v4_FINAL_actual.xlsx. By Wednesday nobody is certain which version is live, and two people are editing different copies.
• Manual actuals. Sales and stock have to be pasted in from another system every week. That's hours of work, and it's where errors creep in.
• The one person who understands it. The model only fully makes sense to the merchandiser who built it. When they're on leave — or they leave — the WSSI becomes a black box the rest of the team is afraid to touch.

None of this is a failure of the spreadsheet idea. The WSSI is the right tool. The problem is that a season-long, multi-tab, hand-fed model is fragile by construction, and the fragility shows up exactly when trading gets busy.

What a WSSI is not

A WSSI is not a forecast and it's not a finance report. It's an operational control document for in-season trading. It uses your plan as the baseline, but its job is to manage the gap between plan and reality week by week — chasing intake, flagging cover risk, and triggering markdown decisions before the stock goes stale. It sits downstream of planning and upstream of the buying actions you take each week.

How a WSSI connects to the buy

The stock and intake lines in a WSSI are only as good as the orders behind them. When you flex a buy — pull intake forward, cancel an order, add a repeat — the WSSI should move with it. In a spreadsheet that reconciliation is manual and lagging. The forward-cover view is only useful if the intake numbers in it reflect what's actually on order and confirmed to land.