Is the year actually going to plan?

A revenue and profit target you set once, checked against what really happened, month by month.

Most Amazon targets live in a spreadsheet that was right in January and untouched by March. The number was never wrong, exactly — it just stopped being compared to anything. By the time the year is visibly off, two quarters have gone and nobody can say which part of the business did it.

What we do about it

• Set the year once: a revenue target and a gross-margin target. We split it across the months using your own seasonality and last year’s shape, and you correct any month you disagree with.
• Break the target down by whatever a profit centre means to you — account, brand or marketplace — or by a column you define yourself and import against your own products.
• Every step shows what you did this year, what you did last year and what the bottom-up forecast expects, so the target is set next to the evidence rather than in a vacuum.
• The matrix then reads goal against forecast against actual — revenue, gross margin and margin percent — for the total and for every value of your chosen breakdown.

A real moment

The year is six percent behind at the halfway mark and the meeting has the usual three theories. The breakdown by brand answers it in one pass: two brands are ahead of goal, one is exactly on it, and a fourth — small enough that nobody had been watching it — is down by a third and has been since March. The number was in the same report the whole time; what was missing was a target to read it against.

A composite scenario, drawn from patterns we see repeatedly — not a named customer's result.