Buying & selling
Forecasting pallets: the unglamorous spreadsheet that saves real money
Request pricing
Everything marked with a star is required. The rest helps us quote faster.
The best-priced pallet customers we have are not the biggest. They are the ones who tell us what they will need before they need it.
A rush order costs more for reasons that are not margin. It interrupts the picking schedule, it pulls a forklift off the sort line, it often means pulling from a lot reserved for somebody else, and it frequently requires a dedicated trailer rather than a paired run. All of that is real cost, and it lands on the invoice.
The whole forecast
| Month | Footprint | Grade | Expected units |
|---|---|---|---|
| March | 48x40 GMA | A | 900 |
| March | 48x40 GMA | B | 1,400 |
| March | Half pallet 48x20 | New | 220 |
| April | 48x40 GMA | A | 1,100 |
| April | 48x40 GMA | B | 1,400 |
| May | 48x40 GMA | A | 1,600 |
| May | 36x36 keg square | A | 180 |
It does not need to be accurate. It needs to exist. A forecast that turns out to be 25% wrong is enormously more useful than no forecast, because the shape of demand is what drives our purchasing and our repair line scheduling, not the precise number.
What it does to the price
| Line | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blended unit price | $11.40 | $9.80 | −14% |
| Rush orders per quarter | 5 | 0 | Eliminated |
| Dedicated (unpaired) trailers | 9 / quarter | 2 / quarter | −78% |
| Stockout events | 4 / year | 0 | Eliminated |
| Invoices to process | ~24 / month | 1 / month | −96% |
| Core revenue recovered | Sporadic | Every swap | +$380 / month |
The unit price falls partly because of a programme rate and mostly because rush premiums and unpaired freight stop happening. The administrative line is the one finance teams notice first.
How to build one in twenty minutes
- Pull last year's pallet invoices. Total units by month. That is your baseline shape.
- Split by footprint. If it is 95% one footprint, do not bother splitting the rest.
- Split by grade using the three questions — racking, automation, customer-facing. Most operations discover they need less Grade A than they buy.
- Apply next year's growth as a single percentage. Resist the temptation to be clever.
- Send it. Email, spreadsheet, whatever. Update it monthly with actuals so it self-corrects.
The honest caveat
Forecasting pays if your demand is reasonably predictable. If your volume swings by more than about 40% month to month with no pattern, a forecast is a work of fiction and a programme built on it will cause more friction than it removes. We will tell you that during the design conversation rather than after you sign something.
For everyone else — which is most operations — it is twenty minutes once and five minutes a month, and it is the highest-return administrative task in pallet procurement by a distance.