Co-founder, Permute
Kartik Deshpande
Co-founder at Permute. Writes about consolidation, close reporting, and the parts of finance and commercial work that never make it into a dashboard.
16 articles
- For Consumer BrandsAI inventory planning: what works and what breaksClaude and ChatGPT can read a warehouse export and explain a reorder formula. Neither can hold the four files where your real stock position lives.·6 min read
- For Consumer BrandsAI trade promotion planning needs three feeds to agreePromotion ROI is an identity problem before it is an analysis problem. The plan, the shipments and the POS have to describe the same promotion first.·8 min read
- For Consumer BrandsCPG demand planning starts with the sales historyEvery forecast is a statement about the past. Most of the error in a CPG forecast is inherited from a history assembled by hand each cycle.·5 min read
- For Consumer BrandsDemand forecasting automation for ecommerce brandsAutomation can assemble and maintain the sales history a forecast runs on. It cannot tell you what a launch with no comparable past will sell.·7 min read
- For Consumer BrandsDemand forecasting mistakes that a better model will not fixThe total landed close and the SKUs underneath it were wrong in both directions. Most of the named errors turn out to be one error, inherited from the history the forecast was measured against.·8 min read
- For Consumer BrandsHow to automate POS data analysisScheduling the retailer exports is the smaller half of the job. The product mapping and the calendar underneath them are where the week goes.·7 min read
- For Consumer BrandsHow to automate Shopify reports on a scheduleShopify will schedule what Shopify knows. The weekly report that gets opened needs cost, ad spend and wholesale alongside it.·5 min read
- For Consumer BrandsInventory planning automation: what to automate firstTeams try to automate the reorder decision and stall. The automatable part is the assembly that happens before anyone decides anything.·5 min read
- For Consumer BrandsPrice pack architecture software: what to look forThe decision is which pack sizes sell at which price in which channel. Most of the work is making one pack comparable to another.·6 min read
- For Consumer BrandsSKU-level margin analysis across channelsOne product has a different margin in every channel it sells through, and most of the difference is in costs nobody has attached to it yet.·5 min read
- For Consumer BrandsTrade spend management software: what to look forFollow one promotion from the plan to the deduction on the remittance. Whichever tool closes that loop is the one worth buying.·6 min read
- For Consumer BrandsVendor scorecard software: what to look forA scorecard is only as good as the fill rate underneath it, and fill rate is a definition before it is a number.·6 min read
- For Consumer BrandsCPG analytics software: what to look for before you buyThe categories that show up in an evaluation are built for different jobs, and which one fits depends on how many places your sales history lives.·8 min read
- For Fractional CFOsCash flow forecasting software: what to look for (and what to skip)Before you compare features, you need to know which category of tool actually fits the job you are trying to do.·7 min read
- For Fractional CFOsHow to automate monthly client financial reportsThe manual rebuild works for one client. Here is what breaks it at five, and how automated financial reporting fixes the process rather than just the tool.·7 min read
- For Fractional CFOsMonth-end close: a step-by-step process that scalesThe month end close process that survives the tenth client is built differently from the one that just survived the first.·8 min read