The two biggest shopping days of the year—Black Friday and Cyber Monday (or BFCM)—are just around the corner.
For shoppers, it's a major chance to save big, and for businesses, an opportunity to close the year strong.
U.S. Black Friday online sales have grown by 460% from 2013 to 2024. Key events such as the boom of online shopping during the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and inflation have made it hard for retailers to confidently predict outcomes.
Last year, 197 million Americans shopped during Cyber Week, spending $10.8 billion on Black Friday alone, a 10.2% jump from the year before. Adobe Analytics projects that online holiday sales in 2025 will reach $253.4 billion in the U.S.
With these projections and not to mention ongoing tariff impacts, finance teams will need to balance discounts with profit, stay on top of cash flow and plan around rising costs across the board.
We created this Black Friday planning guide to help your finance team get ready for BFCM 2025.
Below, you’ll find strategies and practical tips for financial and operational planning, plus free Excel templates to make the process easier.
Changing market conditions, rising import costs, and global uncertainty can throw off forecasts and profit margins, with ripple effects across inventory, pricing and cash-flow plans.
We’ve seen this before. During Black Friday 2021, U.S. online sales dipped slightly from $9 billion in 2020 to $8.9 billion as shoppers started buying earlier, and retailers faced product shortages from global supply chain delays.
And in 2025, those pressures haven’t gone away. Tariff hikes, inflation, and shifting consumer behavior continue to test how quickly finance teams can respond. In fact, a 2025 McKinsey report found that in the first half of the year, more than one-third of U.S. consumers have traded down in one category while splurging in another.
This mix of price sensitivity and selective spending makes demand harder to forecast and reinforces the need for finance teams to plan flexibly and adjust quickly as buying patterns change.
Let’s look at seven ways your team can plan and stay adaptable this BFCM season.
Accurately predicting demand is one of the biggest factors determining how your business fares during BFCM. Too little stock means missed sales opportunities. Too much, and you tie up cash in products that sit on the shelf after the season ends.
That’s why planning well in advance is critical.
Retail advisor David Ian Grey recommends that finance teams should begin preparations as early as May.
Yet, data from Anvyl shows that one-third of brands still don’t start inventory planning until September, just weeks before the holiday rush.
Starting early also gives finance teams time to gather the right inputs. That begins with visibility into operational data that is often siloed outside of Finance. Logistics teams know what is delayed, e-commerce teams know what shoppers are browsing, and field teams know what is moving fastest in stores. These insights help confirm whether your sales and inventory targets are realistic.
Using integrated business planning software makes this easier because it brings data from all your source systems together—including both finance and operations—allowing you to update your forecasts continuously as conditions change.
With clearer operational visibility earlier in the process, promotions, inventory decisions, and spending plans stay aligned even when demand shifts mid-campaign.
Vena has a free Inventory Forecasting Template for Excel to help you model expected demand, set stocking thresholds earlier in the year, and reduce the risk of overstock or sell-through gaps during BFCM.
Planning early is important, but planning early is not the same as ordering early.
To get ahead of the August 1, 2025 tariff deadlines this year, some retailers moved up their inventory shipments, with more than half of orders placed by the end of May, Retail Dive reports. While this helped them avoid added costs, it also tied up cash and increased the risk of overstock if demand ended up lower than expected.
This is why agility matters.
Tariffs, shifting buyer behavior, and fast-changing demand patterns make static or Finance-only forecasting unreliable. When plans are created in isolation, Finance often reacts too late, missing signals that other teams are catching in real time.
Cross-functional inputs make those adjustments more accurate and timely. This kind of cross-functional visibility is exactly what helped Schuh strengthen its planning process. Before the UK-based shoe retailer implemented Vena, its budgets and forecasts were built almost entirely within Finance.
But with Vena, Schuh now easily involves 35 employees across departments in their planning process, including their field team, retail director, management accounting team, and heads of e-commerce, logistics, marketing, and IT. Receiving direct input from these teams improved forecasting accuracy and helped cut their budgeting cycle time by 50%.
Having your forecasts grounded in data from cross-functional teams makes projecting revenue easier, so they can adjust spending as the season unfolds.
Projecting revenue ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday helps finance teams set realistic sales targets, balance marketing spend, and understand how discounts will impact margins during the busiest shopping period of the year.
Tracking revenue in real time helps you decide which product lines to promote, where to allocate marketing spend, and how to plan future campaigns.
Missing revenue targets can affect cash flow, budgets, and investor confidence, which is why ongoing revenue tracking and forecasting are essential year-round.
To stay agile, adopt rolling forecasts instead of static models so you can adjust quickly as new data comes in.
Use this free Revenue Projection Template for Excel to model different outcomes, identify potential shortfalls early, and keep your plans on track.
During BFCM, marketing budgets can climb fast—from ad placements to influencer partnerships and campaign tools—so visibility into every dollar matters.
A clear expense plan helps your finance team stay in control of spending. You know exactly how much money you're spending and where it's being allocated. This also helps you calculate metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) and understand which marketing levers generated the most revenue and best ROI.
Start by mapping out all planned marketing activities, including paid ads, email automation, content creation, and software costs. Assign cost estimates to each and include a small buffer for unexpected opportunities or increases in ad spend.
Download and use this free Marketing Campaign Report Excel Template to track the performance of all your ad campaigns and compare results against your forecasts.
Apart from inventory planning, marketing and advertising often get most of the attention during BFCM. But labor costs can just as easily affect your bottom line.
Increased sales activity often leads to longer hours, temporary hires, and extra customer support, and these costs can add up quickly if they aren’t built into your budget early. Maybe you need to hire additional staff to work your retail stores, or hire an extra developer to ensure your website is ready for the BFCM traffic.
Whatever the case may be, strategic workforce planning allows you to understand how your labor expenses, among other costs, will affect your business's bottom line. It helps you protect profit margins and keep operations running smoothly.
Think about the teams that may need additional support, such as retail operations, logistics, fulfillment, IT, and customer service. Then model different staffing scenarios to understand how labor costs might shift as demand fluctuates.
You can use our Workforce Planning Template for Excel to forecast seasonal headcount, estimate labor expenses, and see how staffing adjustments could affect profitability during the peak season.
With tariffs affecting the cost of goods, shoppers are still feeling stretched this year, making them more likely to wait for the right discount and be more selective about where they spend their money.
The most effective finance teams plan for multiple scenarios. What if consumer demand drops because of inflation fatigue? What if supply chain delays push arrivals past Cyber Monday? Modeling “what-if” scenarios around these outcomes allows you to understand how each one affects margins, revenue and working capital.
The goal is to stay resilient, and scenario planning helps you build flexibility into your operations so that when things shift, you can respond quickly without disrupting performance.
As Vena Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Architect Rishi Grover shared with Retail TouchPoints, “It’s not enough to effectively manage your inventory. It’s about building resilience in case one part of the system is suddenly shut down.”
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday can deliver strong sales, it’s equally important to prepare for scenarios where results fall short of expectations. Modeling both best- and worst-case outcomes keeps your business agile and ready for whatever happens.
Use this free What-If Analysis Template for Excel to test different financial outcomes and plan your next moves with confidence.
For many retail and e-commerce businesses, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest sales events of the year. The results from this period often shape the budgeting and investment decisions made for the following months.
If your budgeting process is too rigid, it becomes difficult to adjust once real numbers start coming in from the holiday rush—typically the last two months of the year. Being able to refresh your forecasts quickly helps you respond to actual performance, reallocate resources, and stay aligned with revenue goals.
This is where modern budgeting and planning software becomes especially valuable. Vena, for example, automatically pulls in your latest actuals and lets finance teams model scenarios on the fly using the familiar Excel interface, thanks to its native integration.
As a retail or e-commerce business, Black Friday and Cyber Monday completely set the tone for your company’s year-end performance. With the right planning, your finance team can stay ahead of shifting costs, changing consumer behavior, and unpredictable demand.
Use these six tips—and Vena’s free Excel templates—to forecast revenue, manage expenses, plan staffing, and update your budgets with real-time data. The more agile your planning process is, the easier it becomes to protect margins and make confident decisions during the busiest shopping season of the year.