Gradora / SIOP / Support

Gradora SIOP support

One person answers this email, and it is the person who wrote the app. There is no ticket system and no chatbot. Questions about how a number was calculated are welcome — the reasoning is written down, so you can usually get a real answer rather than a shrug.

Get in touch

hello@no.spam.invalid.handfulapps.com

Please do not send your planning data. Item masters, order books and forecasts are commercially sensitive, and there is no safe way to receive them here. Describe the shape of the problem instead: which screen, how many parts, what you expected and what you got. A screenshot with the part numbers blurred is usually enough.

Getting started

I have installed it. Where do I begin?

On the Plans screen choose Sample data… → Load it into a new plan. That gives you a five-cycle site with published history, and every screen works on it with no subscription. Walk the ten steps down the left-hand Track in order. It is the fastest way to see whether the tool matches how you work.

My ERP does not produce these files.

Choose Download import templates… on the Plans screen. It writes one workbook with a sheet per file, every column explained with its meaning, format and an example, plus the same seven as CSVs. Hand that to whoever writes your ERP reports.

Do I have to map columns every month?

No. Mappings are remembered per plan and per file type, so the second cycle should be a five-minute job. If your ERP changes a column name, the preview will tell you before anything is written.

Which CSV formats does it read?

UTF-8, Windows-1250 and Windows-1252; semicolon, comma or tab; comma or dot decimals; day-first, month-first or ISO dates. It detects all four and refuses to guess when a value is genuinely ambiguous rather than picking one and hoping.

How big a plan can be

Gradora SIOP is measured to run a full year of monthly cycles at up to 500 active parts in one plan, on an iPad Air with 8 GB of memory. Above that the app still imports, calculates and publishes — nothing is ever refused — but it warns you, at import, above Recalculate and on the Publish step.

Two things worth knowing about that number.

It counts your whole item master, not what you sell. Every component in the bill of materials is planned individually, and at a typical site one sellable product costs seven or eight rows. So 500 parts is roughly 65 products.

And the limit is not the planning calculation. On the same iPad, 2,000 parts completed twelve monthly cycles cleanly. What strains first is the meeting-pack workbook export, which builds its whole output in memory; at 1,000 parts that export failed on the measured device while every step before it succeeded. 500 is the largest size where everything, export included, finished comfortably. An iPad with less memory may reach that point sooner, and a Mac will go considerably further.

If your site is larger, the remedy is the plan itself: keep one plan per product family and each stays under the ceiling.

When something goes wrong

I published a cycle by mistake.

A published cycle cannot be edited or unpublished. That is the point of publishing, and it is enforced in storage rather than by a disabled button, so there is no back door. What you can do is create the next cycle, which copies forward your overrides and open decisions, and correct it there. If an auto-archive folder was set, an archive of the moment before is sitting in it.

A number looks wrong.

Tap it. Every figure in the demand plan opens a trace showing its stream split, the rows behind it, and any override with the reason and author. If the trace makes sense and the number still looks wrong, that is worth an email — include the trace, not the data.

The app will not open.

If the store file is damaged the app says so on launch and offers to move it aside and start fresh, keeping the broken files rather than deleting them. If you have a plan archive, import it into the fresh store and you are back where you were.

My subscription is not recognised.

Choose Subscription → Restore purchases from the Plans screen. That happens on a new machine, after a reinstall, or if you signed in with a different Apple Account. If your organisation bought your seat through Apple Business Manager, check with whoever manages your devices that the seat is still assigned to you.

Your data, and getting it out

Where is my data kept?

On your device, in the app's own sandboxed storage, along with the original files you imported. Nothing is sent anywhere. See the privacy policy.

How do I back it up?

Back up the device as you normally would, and export a plan archive for anything you would be sorry to lose. You can also set an auto-archive folder, and the app writes a full archive there after every publish.

Can I move a plan between my Mac and my iPad?

Yes — export a plan archive on one and import it on the other. There is no sync, deliberately: sync means a server, and a server means your forecast leaving the building.

What happens to my data if I stop subscribing?

Nothing. Your plans, cycles and published history stay on the device and stay readable, and plan archives still export. Importing, publishing and pack export stop until you subscribe again.

Buying and billing

How much is it?

$29.99 a month or $299.99 a year, with a free trial, and volume pricing for several seats. The pricing page has the detail, including what stays free permanently.

How do I cancel or get a refund?

Both go through Apple, who is the seller. Cancel in your Apple Account settings; request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot process either, and we cannot see your payment details at any point.

We need several seats.

Write in with the number of planners and a redemption code comes back, setting the volume rate for the term bought; the App Store has no way to apply a per-seat discount on its own. Your IT team can also buy and assign seats through Apple Business Manager with the device management they already run, at the standard rate. Details on the pricing page.