Sales Forecast
This article will discuss how your organization can implement best practices leading to an effective Sales Forecast Report, and how to leverage the report to your organization’s benefit.
Navigating to the Sales Forecast Report:
As with many things on Q360, there are multiple ways of navigating to the Sales Forecast Report
- Workflow Main Menu > Sales Overview > Sales Forecast
- Sales Main Menu > Quick Views > Sales Forecast
Best Practices for an accurate Sales Forecast:
This report is limited to what data your organization feeds into it. If dates and / or other source data are outdated or inaccurate, the Sales Forecast will also present outdated / inaccurate information.
Steps to ensure accurate output:
- Mark opportunities as closed whenever an opportunity is won or lost. This can be done by populating the “Won/Lost Reason” field on the Opportunity form.
- When an opportunity is first created, a portion of the information entered can be best guesses, however, as things become clearer, it is recommended that sales reps continuously update their opportunities (this may be done directly from the Sales Forecast)
- Incorporate the report in your organization’s processes. How this is done will depend largely on how your organization structures functional areas. Some examples of processes:
- Sales Reps spend 15 minutes daily tracking and updating their open opportunities.
- Sales Managers conduct regular sales meetings during which the Sales Forecast report is shared and examined in detail.
- Operations management periodically checks the Sales Forecast to see upcoming jobs and opportunities.
Columns on the Sales Forecast
The Sales Forecast is split into two sections. The first half pulls data from the opportunity form, while the second half is an aggregate of all open quotes that do not have the “Optional” flag checked on the Header tab of the quote. Q360 aggregates columns for Price, Cost, GP, and Margin percentages. It will further breakdown the line items on the quote by Master Type, and additionally by Price, Cost, GP and GM.
Highlight Functionality
The Sales Forecast has additional built in functionality relating to cell highlighting (color):
- Company: Highlighted Green if the Opportunity was created in the past 30 days
- Value: Highlighted Green or Red depending on whether the value increased (green) or decreased (red)
- Close Date: Highlighted Green or Red depending if the Close Date was moved to an earlier date (green) or delayed (red)
- Probability: Highlighted Green or Red depending on whether the probability is higher (green) or lower (red) than the previous entry
Related Q360 Functionality
There are other areas of Q360 that will use the Opportunity form as a data source.
Maintaining accurate and timely “clean” data has impacts beyond the Sales Forecast, extending into the Opportunity Dashboard and the One Dashboard. The Labor Capacity Forecast report also relies on the Install and Close dates of the Opportunity to estimate future Labor Capacity.
It is important to note that opportunities will fall off the Sales Forecast upon closing them (by populating the Won/Lost Reason field). We can still review them using other reports on Q360. We recommend using the reports below to review historic opportunities.
- Sales Opp Review: Review information particular to the Opportunity including the Won/Lost Reason and Aging/Duration days
- Sales Booking Report: Review information related to Orders that were created from Opportunities on Q360.