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probably the hardest thing about forecasting for your years is coming up with
the first year's monthly numbers
so we've built a tool to help you with that inside the software
we can right click on any table that has
the twelve-month forecasting for the first year and then choose forecaster from the menu
and that will bring up our forecaster tool
that allows ut to do a forecast for that product or service in
a couple of different ways
we can do a point and click forecast so if we need
seasonality we can go ahead and point and click on the graph
we could have our sales increase and then fall off in the middle of the year and then level
out for the end of the year
we can quickly do a point and click forecast for seasonality
we can also do a growth rate forecast so we can set our first month
sales by pointing and clicking or typing in a number if we want to
and then we can tell the program to use a growth rate
and then select a growth rate from the slider here so we can tell it what we want our
growth rate to be and then the program will forecast using that growth rate off of
a hundred units
for the first month
what the rest of the twelve months is going to be
and then it'll give us the forecast total
whenever we have this
set up the way we want it to be
we can just click ok in the program can apply those numbers to the actual spreadsheet for
us
so we don't have to do our monthly forecasting
then we can scroll over to the next two years
look at our original number and then come up with an estimate of our next numbers
so next year we plan on doing forty five hundred
and then the following year we're going to do fifty two hundred
units
in that product or service
and then one other thing that you can do using the forecaster again we can start
with the growth rate so if we want to go ahead and use a growth rate of ten percent
but then we want to do seasonality on top of it we can go ahead and adjust that
straight line growth rate afterwards
to provide some seasonality to our forecast as well
so however you want to do it the tools are there just use them in whichever way is more comfortable
for you
so once we fill in our unit fields per unit then add our unit prices
so say we are going to charge a unit price of fifty dollars for the first product
and maybe a hundred dollars for our second product
the program is going to go ahead and calculate our
sales for each of those products
and then we just have to tell it what percentage
of our unit prices or skills is attributable to cost of sales
so let's see the first product we have a really low cost of sales ten percent
i wanted
and then the next product or service we're going to have a higher cost of sales maybe it's
fifty percent cost of sales
the program is going to can go ahead and use that data to calculate our unit cost
and then our total cost of sales for us
and that completes the sales forecast
for us just that quick
we'd still want to go over and fill in
our unit prices for the second and third year
so that completes our sales forecast
and then we can move on to back to the contribution margin table we were looking at earlier and
you'll see now are sales and cost of sales information is there for us so we can move on with
filling in the rest of the data in this table
so I want to pause there really quick and see if we have any questions about using the spreadsheets
in the software
ok you guys are being way too easy on me