Revenue Forecasting Process Flow
Planning and Budgeting assumes a bottom-up forecasting approach, where budget owners use historical Actual Revenue values to create their Customer and Item Revenue Forecasts. Forecasts are based on trends or entered manually by Customer or Item.
The Revenue Forecast is created, validated, and adjusted during the forecasting phase.
Creating the Revenue Forecast
The budget owner uses the trend-based Revenue forms to create the Revenue Forecasts. The budget owner also has the option to use predictive planning to create Forecast values from predictions. The budget owner can also add rows in the Forecast for:
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NetSuite Customers and Items not yet listed in the Forecast.
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Potential new NetSuite Customers and Items in the Forecast.
Validating the Revenue Forecast
The budget owner views the Predictive/Spread forms to analyze the Revenue trends in relation to historical Actuals. These forms provide a reasonableness test to ensure accuracy based on historical trends. They also view the Revenue Dashboards to review Customer and Item Revenue trends.
The finance executive views the Customer, Item, and Class Dashboards to validate Revenue projections against recent historical Revenue. They analyze Revenue in total amounts, as a percentage of total Revenue, or in comparison to prior years. Finally, they use Predictive/Spread forms to analyze the Revenue trends in relation to historical Actuals. These forms provide a reasonableness test to ensure accuracy based on historical trends.
Adjusting the Revenue Forecast
The finance executive views the Top Level Adj forms to analyze Revenue by Account in a list format.