Forecasts can be unpredictable and volatile, especially when your CFO comes knocking and says your projected sales figures are inaccurate. This particular trick is most useful for used time over a period, typically used by consulting and staffing companies.
With the Revenue Recognition add-on, you accrue the order sum per month directly on the order. See How to accrue order sums with Revenue Recognition. In Report centre, the Accruals, Accruals: Best-case and Accruals: Probable outcome widgets then show your accrued sales.
With the Insights add-on, you can instead report accrued sales in Insights by using custom fields for start and end date on order rows. This allows for a forecast showing accrued sales over an exact interval. As opposed to close date, which is the date a deal was confirmed, the start and end date can break down the sales value down to the day value.
For example, you close a deal worth $1,000. The start date is today and the interval period is 100 days. The end date is therefore 100 days from now, making the daily value of the deal $10 while the entire contract’s value remains $1,000 closed today.
With this in place, forecasted and accrued sales dashboards can be created in Insights, Upsales’ business intelligence tool.
Pro tip!
- Make these fields mandatory to avoid anyone forgetting to fill them out.
- Apply them to order row instead of order as one contract might have multiple accruing intervals.
You create custom fields on order rows under Settings → CRM → Fields → Order row. You need to be an administrator to access this.