Quarterly Forecast @ Deal

[GPLE]

Hi - My company would like to forecast entire full year deals based on our quarters.

For example:

We have a deal which will bring in 100K over the next year.

10K in the 1st Quarter

20K in the 2nd Q

30K in the 3rd Q

40K in the 4th Q

How would you recommend we enter the amount in the deal? We would like to forecast based on our Quarters. That will help us determine which deals to prioritize based on revenue.

I've added 4 properties to the deal (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th estimated revenue etc) which then calculate the 'amount' of the deal. Is there a better way of doing this?

[Jonno_Price]

Hi @GPLE - I think you've taken the right approach here to have seperate properties for each quarter if you require entire forecasting by quarters based on estimated revenue. The reason I say that is I note in your example that the amounts differ in each Q. If this was a standard recurring amount then you could perhaps instead use the default Annual Recurring Revenue property and then split by quarter using the report tool. 

One issue you could possibly face with your Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 properties is how you would deal with different financial years? E.g. if you closed the deal example you mentioned above but in Q3 of this FY - then how would you allocate Q1 & Q2 of the following year? I'm guessing you'd need to create a seperate deal? 

Just to play **bleep**'s advocate - if the end-goal is to prioritize deals to focus on based on revenue - should the focus then not remain on the entire estimated deal value across the lifetime of the contract based on close date? Then you use close date in each Q to look at weighted forecasting. 

If you go to: Reports > Analytics Tools > Forecasts and Pipelines and have a look at the different reports there. You can select reps / sales team and then look at forecasts by quarter. This will not be the actual revenue per Q but rather the total contract revenue that could close during that quarter - which I would say is a different way to get the same end-result of finding the deals to prioritise. Hope that makes sense!  In the Weighted Pipeline Forecast for example the forecasts are based on the win probability % entered on your deal stages in settings - and these you can look at in terms of close dates by quarter.

[TiphaineCuisset]

Hi @GPLE 

Thank you for reaching out.

I want to tag some of our experts on this - @Josh @Jonno_Price @GeorgeBThomas do you have any thoughts for @GPLE on this? 

Thank you

Best

Tiphaine