How Can Wholesalers Avoid Peak-Season Stockouts? Inventory Forecasting in Business Central

It’s mid-November, and for most wholesalers and distributors that means one thing: the busiest stretch of the year is here. Orders spike, lead times stretch, and the gap between “we’ve got plenty” and “sorry, that’s out of stock” can close in a matter of days.

If your buyers are still forecasting from spreadsheets and gut feel, you’ll know the pattern. Fast movers run dry just when customers want them, while slower lines sit in the warehouse tying up cash. The good news is that if you run Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you already have the tools for inventory forecasting in Business Central, many of them built in and ready to switch on.

In this post, I’ll walk through what those tools are, how they fit together, and where I’d start if you want calmer peak seasons from next year onwards.

Why Forecasting Is So Hard for Wholesalers

Inventory management is a trade-off between customer service and cost. Hold too little stock and you risk missed sales; hold too much and you tie up working capital.

For wholesale and distribution businesses, that trade-off is harder because:

• Catalogues are big: hundreds or thousands of SKUs, each with its own demand pattern.
• Demand is seasonal: what sells in November looks nothing like what sells in March.
• Supplier lead times vary: an order placed too late can’t be fixed by working harder.
• The data lives in too many places: sales history in one system, purchase orders in another and buyer knowledge in people’s heads.

Most of the distributors we speak to don’t lack data. They lack a simple, repeatable way to turn it into buying decisions.

Inventory Forecasting in Business Central: The Built-In Tools

The encouraging part is that you don’t need a new system to get a better forecast. Business Central already gives you several connected tools for forecasting and replenishment. You don’t need all of them on day one, but it helps to understand what each one does.

1. The Sales and Inventory Forecast extension

This extension uses Azure AI to predict future sales from your sales history and give you a clear view of expected stockouts. In Business Central online, the connection to Azure AI is already set up, so there’s no data science project needed to get going.

In practice, it shows up in two helpful places:

• On the item itself: when you choose an item on the Items page, the Item Forecast pane shows its estimated sales for the coming period, so you can see whether you’re likely to run out soon.
• When you’re buying: as you create a purchase order for a vendor, the extension can suggest restocking other items you usually buy from that vendor that are forecast to run low.

A sensible starting point is to forecast by month with a 12-month horizon. There are a couple of things worth knowing. The forecast is based on posted sales in your item ledger entries, so it needs enough history to work with; if there’s too little data, or it varies a lot, the service won’t make a prediction. It also produces one aggregated forecast across all locations and variants, so if you run several depots you’ll need to split the figures yourself.

2. The Sales Forecasting Power BI report

For a higher-level view, Business Central (2025 release wave 2 and later) includes a Power BI Sales Forecasting report. Out of the box, it predicts the next three months of sales from the previous six months, assuming monthly seasonality, and lets you look at the forecast by customer, item and salesperson. You can adjust the forecast length, seasonality and confidence interval in Power BI Desktop.

This is the report I’d put in front of sales and purchasing managers together, because it gets both teams looking at the same picture of what’s coming.

3. The requisition worksheet and planning parameters

Forecasts only help if they turn into orders. That’s where the requisition worksheet comes in. Its Calculate Plan batch job works out a replenishment plan for items set up to be purchased or transferred, and suggests an action for each line, such as creating a new order or changing the quantity on an existing one. You review the suggestions, accept the ones you agree with and use Carry Out Action Message to create the orders.

The quality of those suggestions depends on the planning parameters on each item, such as reorder point, safety stock quantity and safety lead time. Make your planning horizon long enough to cover your lead times, otherwise items with long lead times won’t be ordered in time. Our Supply Planning and Availability and Purchasing pages explain how these pieces fit together.

Where Copilot Fits In

Even with a forecast in place, buyers still need a quick way to check a stock level, an open purchase order or recent sales for a product line, rather than building a filtered list by hand. That’s where Copilot helps.

With version 29 (2026 release wave 2), Microsoft Copilot in Business Central replaces the previous Chat with Copilot experience. It’s currently a production-ready preview, and it lets you ask those questions about your Business Central data in plain English, from the Copilot pane in the top right of the page.

A few things are worth knowing:

• It’s read-only: Copilot shows you data that matches your question but doesn’t change anything.
• It respects permissions: it can only see the Business Central data you’re allowed to see.
• It needs switching on: the Chat capability has to be active in your environment, and you need permission to use it.

Copilot doesn’t replace the forecast or the planning engine. What it does is make it quicker to sense-check what they’re telling you. AI prepares the picture; your buyers still make the call. You can read more about the wider picture on our Copilot and Agents in Business Central page, and in our recent post on what Business Central 2026 release wave 2 means for wholesale and distribution.

A Quick Note for Shopify Sellers

If you sell through Shopify and use the Business Central Shopify connector, there’s a date to put in the diary. The connector released in 2026 release wave 1 relies on a Shopify API version that’s supported until 31 December 2026, so you’ll need to be on the latest version of Business Central before then to keep your integration running.

That matters for forecasting, too: if your online orders stop syncing in the middle of peak season, your sales history (and your next forecast) will have gaps. Our Ecommerce page covers how Shopify and Business Central work together.

How to Get Started With Inventory Forecasting in Business Central

It’s too late to transform this year’s peak, but it’s the perfect time to gather evidence for next year. Here’s where I’d start:

1. Note what went wrong this season. Which lines ran out, which overstocked, and why? That list becomes your test set.
2. Check your data. Forecasts are only as good as the sales history behind them. Make sure sales are posted consistently and items are set up cleanly in Inventory.
3. Switch on the forecast for a handful of items. Start with your fast movers and compare the forecast with what actually happens.
4. Review planning parameters. Set reorder points, safety stock and lead times that reflect reality, then let the requisition worksheet do the heavy lifting.
5. Put one shared report in front of sales and purchasing. The Power BI Sales Forecasting report is a good place to start.
6. Try Copilot for quick questions. Once it’s enabled, encourage buyers to use it to check stock and orders before they place them.

If you’d like support along the way, our implementation and support teams help businesses set up exactly this kind of process, using out-of-the-box capabilities wherever possible.

Calmer Peaks Start With Better Forecasts

Peak season will always be busy. But it doesn’t have to be a scramble. With inventory forecasting in Business Central, connected replenishment planning and Copilot to help you check the numbers, your team can spend less time firefighting and more time serving customers.

If you’d like to talk through how forecasting and replenishment could work in your business, contact Cloud9. Or, if you’re considering Business Central for your wholesale or distribution business, get a quote with our Clarity Tool.