A merchandise financial plan tied to the bottom-up.
Top-down targets reconciled to the demand forecast in one grid — so the plan everyone buys against is one number, not five exports.
Merchandise financial plan
The money envelope — Plan vs Actual on every category × month cell, reconciled to the forecast.
Why the financial plan sets the ceiling on the season.
Full-price sell-through gap between retail leaders and the industry — most of it down to how they act on the forecast.
Source: Incisiv × WRC × Anaplan 2026
Share of unplanned markdown cost attributed to upstream buying and forecasting decisions, not in-season demand.
Source: Coresight industry research
Face the Future's full-price sell-through gain after the plan moved with the forecast.
Source: Audited customer outcome
What breaks before financial planning runs to plan.
Three steps from target to a plan that ties to the buy.
MFP at SKU × channel × month
Plan at the same granularity as the forecast — not category averages. Variance attributes to the line where the move happened.
Bottom-up reconciled to top-down
Both sides agree on one number live. Top-down ripples down; bottom-up flags against the top.
Cycle gates with Draft-to-Baseline
Plans gate at draft → committed → signed-off. Every move audited; every cycle reviewable.
The money envelope — Plan vs Actual on every cell.
The money envelope · category × month · Plan vs Actual on every cell
What changes once the plan ties to the buy.
One MFP, every category, in one place
Sales, margin, inventory, receipts and OTB by month, by category, by channel. The same numbers the CFO is approving and the buyer is committing to.
Plan in intent, not formulas
Tia authors columns and views in the planner's own language ('show me the categories overshooting OTB'). The math sits underneath; the team works on decisions, not spreadsheet wiring.
Lineage on every cell
Click any number and see where it came from, who touched it last, and what changed. Audit is built in, not bolted on at quarter-end.
Fits how your team plans, not the other way round
4-5-4, ISO weeks, monthly, weekly — Tightly fits your retail calendar and your hierarchy, not the calendar a vendor wrote in 2009.
Meet your Planning agent
Lines the financial plan up to the forecast and flags open-to-buy gaps before the buy is committed.
Meet the agentsRe-forecast ready — 3 categories have drifted from plan this week. Want me to stage the moves for your review?
“We used to argue about whose number was right every Monday. Now the plan and the forecast move together — Monday meetings are about what to do, not whose spreadsheet to believe.”
Full-price sell-through (audited)
The plan you have today, and the one Tightly delivers.
The plan lives across dozens of spreadsheets — a line plan and an assortment plan per category, OTB, category MFPs — rolled up by hand into one bottom-up number, then reconciled with finance in a meeting. The real variance only shows up end-of-season.
One model — not a stack of sheets. Top-down and bottom-up reconcile live, and the 0.6% gap is attributed to the category the day it appears, not in a post-mortem.
The plan is one part of the connected plan.
Demand forecasting
The forecast the plan reconciles to — one number both sides agree on.
Open-to-buy
OTB moves with the plan, so the buy is always written against what's expected to sell.
In-season management
Re-plan live as sell-through tells you the plan needs to move.
How does this work with our existing ERP MFP?
Tightly reads receipts, costs and committed buys from your ERP and writes the proposed plan back. We don't replace the ERP — we put the planning model on top so the team plans against live data, not a stale extract.
Can we keep multiple plan versions for scenarios?
Yes. Working / Committed / Signed-off versions per cycle, plus what-if scenarios you can branch and reconcile. Audit log on every move.
How long does it take to seed a new MFP cycle?
Two days to import last year's actuals and the current forecast. The first useful baseline lands at the end of week one.
Who can sign off a plan?
Configurable. Most teams gate at category-owner submits → CFO/MD approves → committed. Every change after sign-off carries a reason and a name.
Does it handle multi-fascia / multi-brand?
Yes — see /platform/scale. Each brand has its own plan; group-level rolls up live with risk register and exposure attribution.
One plan, one number. Top-down and bottom-up, reconciled live.
There's nothing to rip out. Tightly runs on your existing ERP, EDI, e-commerce and POS. Give us 30 minutes and we'll show it on your own categories.