# Confidence as a word Source: https://docs.tightly.io/help/demand/confidence Reviewed: 2026-09-24 ## What confidence is Confidence is always a word and never a percentage. It says how firmly to hold a figure, graded from what the engine stood on rather than from how the figure looks, and it is printed as a word beside the figure or handed back on hover. A forecast line is High, Medium, Low or New. Confidence grades one line before its week is sold; the forecast's track record against what sold is Forecast accuracy, a different thing. ## When forecast confidence is graded The forecasting engine grades every managed variant on each of your own active direct-to-consumer channels on every sync, in the work that follows the sync, and grades every line again each time, including lines with no new sales. The grade reads only your sales and your stock history, so it never depends on which forecast method a line uses. It is on for every plan. ## How a forecast line's confidence is decided A line with fewer than eight weeks of sales history, or fewer than two weeks with any sale, is New: too little to trust any forecast yet. Every other line is scored out of 100 from four things, and the score is never printed: - **Its selling pattern.** A line that sells only now and then, in steady or uneven amounts, loses the most. - **How much and how recently it sells.** Few units a week, or several weeks since the last sale, lowers it; the larger of the two counts, not both. - **Its recent track record.** A rolling check of how far a forecast from the line's own recent sales would have missed; a line with too few checks to judge loses a little. - **A full year of history.** A line with less than 56 weeks loses a little, because it has no last year to learn from. A score of 60 or more is High, 27 or more is Medium, and anything lower is Low. A line on its way down keeps its grade until its score falls more than five points below that grade's threshold, so one quiet week does not flip it. A recent stock-out does not lower the score; it only decides which reason the hover gives. ## The words on the face On Demand forecasting, High and Medium print nothing, because the good case is quiet. Low prints Watch closely and New prints New item, before the flags in the Review cell. Forecast to check leaves only the Watch closely and New item lines, with their count. The reasons under Watch closely are sentences, quoted character for character on hover: > Sales come in irregular bursts, so weekly numbers swing more than most. The monthly total is the steadier read. > This item ran out of stock recently, so sales do not show everything people wanted to buy. The forecast has less to learn from. > Recent forecasts for this item have missed by more than usual. A Low line can carry none of them: low volume, weeks without a sale and a missing year lower the grade without a sentence of their own. Under New item the hover reads: > Only {n} weeks of sales so far. Forecasts firm up after about 8 weeks of selling. or, where the weeks were not counted, only its second sentence. ## Confidence on the other engines Each engine has its own confidence word and never a decimal: a weekly verdict is firm, thin or not measured; a grade's evidence word, measured, borrowed or brand, is its confidence; a buy line may read lower confidence. Where nobody graded, the cell says so, Not checked or Not measured, never a dash and never a zero. ## What you can do about confidence Treat a Watch closely line as one to check by hand before you buy against it; its hover names why, and a line whose sales come in bursts reads more steadily by month. A New item line firms up as it sells; neither is a fault to fix. If you know something the history does not, type a Manual forecast and save it with a reason; the grade still describes the line's own sales. When the engine that grades is late, its own sentence says so, under Forecast status in the Forecast performance drawer. See [The forecasting engine](../engines/forecasting), [The forecast's words](../demand/forecast-words) and [Forecast accuracy](../engines/forecast-accuracy). ## Glossary line Confidence is a word beside a figure, never a percentage: High, Medium, Low, New for a forecast line; firm, thin, not measured for a verdict.