The forecasting section of Futrli Advisor gives you a variety of options to find those all important figures of the future. How will things look in 12 months time, 10 years time? What happens if we hire a new member of the sales team? The forecasting engine allows you to ask those questions and get some answers!
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Now your organization is connected and oozing with data, you'll need to head to the 'Forecasting' section of Futrli Advisor and get the settings in place for your default accounts. This is nice and easy, this help guide will tell you all you need to know, you'll just need to click 'Settings' adjacent to the organization you're working on:
Hitting 'New', providing your settings are in place, will pull up a window with your seven options for creating your forecast:
You can bring in budgets that have been created within your accountancy software, you can start from scratch and build individual forecast items for different accounts, or, like in the example we'll run through now, you can use your organization's previous actual data. Your balance sheet accounts will use the last available figures as opening balances, so the forecast is always as realistic as possible.
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You can build a forecast based purely on what happened twelve months ago if you'd like, it's as easy as clicking the 'Quick Create' option in the 'Create from Last Year's Actuals' box, but for this example, let's be slightly more adventurous - and slightly more optimistic!
Rather than an exact copy of our data from last year, let's say that our income is going to grow by 10%. That will give your numbers going forward a mix up, we can also set some credit term rules as well. Hit 'Advanced Create 'in the 'Create from Last Year's Actuals' box and we'll open a window where we can set some rules:
Give the forecast a name and set your duration and start date accordingly. You'll then see your options for applying some changes to the previous data. In this example, we're going to say that only Income is growing 10%, but we're also going to add credit terms of 30 days for each account category. Toggling the 'Every account category' option will allow you to set rules for income only.
When you're happy everything is set up as you'd like, hit 'Build'.
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That's it, it is that simple! Your forecast will load in a matter of seconds and is ready for reporting on, so let's move away from forecasting and learn how to produce some lovely reports!