Retail Planby RetailNorthstar

Open-to-buy template

A ready-to-use Excel open-to-buy (OTB) worksheet for a 6-month season. Your receipt budget is formula-driven from sales, markdowns, and stock plan — so a single forecast change re-flows every month’s open-to-buy and flags any month you’re already overbought.

  • 6-month season, pre-laid out and ready to fill (retail $)
  • Auto OTB — EOM + Sales + Markdowns − BOM − On Order
  • BOM stock carries automatically from the prior month’s EOM
  • Overbought detection — a negative OTB flags the month
  • Season totals for sales, markdowns, and open-to-buy
  • Editable inputs in blue, auto-calculated columns shaded grey

New to OTB? Read what open-to-buy is or run a single period in the open-to-buy calculator.

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Built for buyers and merchandise planners who own the seasonal receipt budget, and for merchandisers who need the buy reconciled to the plan. If you manage open-to-buy against sales, markdowns, and on-order, this is for you.

Translating OTB into an actual buy? See the buy plan template or read OTB vs WSSI.

This template is useful when the workflow is owned by one person or one small team. It starts to break when multiple teams need the same version of the plan, when inputs change frequently, or when decisions need to flow into assortment, buying, purchase orders, production, and allocation.

Use the spreadsheet to get started. When the process becomes too manual, RetailNorthstar connects the plan, assortment, buy, PO, and production workflow.

A spreadsheet OTB holds for a single department. Across every channel and class, keeping the buy budget reconciled to live sales and receipts is the hard part. RetailNorthstar maintains open-to-buy against plan and re-projects it automatically as actuals land.

Book a Demo →See it on RetailNorthstar →