Custom Salesforce Forecasting for Accounts, Opportunities, or Any Object!
Salesforce out of the box provides a wide array of capabilities to forecast your pipeline and future cash flow, but often what Salesforce offers is overly complex or does not fit how you are using Salesforce or even how you forecast internally.
A common use case that can be difficult to solve with out of box forecasting is the time distribution of a deal. So imagine you sell something for $12 million dollars and that revenue should be realized monthly based on an arbitrary start date and end date. If you are only using the Opportunity object for deal tracking you have no way of forecasting the monthly distribution. Even if you are using products and are using product schedules, most likely there still needs to be human intervention to correctly set the distribution.
Flexible Forecasting
In order to overcome the limitations of out-of-box forecasting we have developed a completely customizable solution. Our forecasting module allows for forecasting to be done off of any object and comes standard with the ability to evenly distribute across a time period or custom distribute the allocation based on custom time periods and variable revenue distribution within those time periods. Want to weight your forecast, no problem! The benefit of this architecture and solution is if you have other forms of forecasting we can extend the solution to meet your needs. Nothing is impossible!
Maybe Out of Box is Enough?
To see if the out-of-the-box product scheduling feature of Salesforce can solve your needs follow the below steps.
Enable Forecasting by going to Setup ⇒ Forecasts Settings
Next, enable Product Schedules by going to Setup ⇒ Product Schedules
Add the Revenue Schedule fields to the Product Layout.
If you are using dynamic forms update the appropriate lightning record page.
If you are using a standard page layout add the fields to the appropriate layout.
Next we are going to have to create the Forecast Type for product schedules. Navigate back to Setup ⇒ Forecasts Settings and click Create a Forecast Type
Select Line Item Schedule for the object.
Select your measure for the forecast. If you are forecasting both a quantity and an amount you will need to create 2 forecast types.
Select Schedule Date for your date type and then complete the rest of the configuration.
The final step is now to configure your products and the revenue schedule for each of those products. Having fun yet?
Too Many Out-of-Box Limitations
Let’s say you have a company that just sells a single deal type. This deal type has a variable length for its deal realization based on a start and end date. To configure this in Salesforce would require you to create a product for each different deal length. This then adds an extra step highly prone to error for your end users and additional items in your system to maintain. This doesn’t even take into consideration if your revenue distribution is not evenly distributed. The final call out is what if you aren’t even forecasting off of the opportunity object? What if your forecast is based on a contract? We can go on and on, but there are clear limitations to what you get out of the box.
So What Now?
If out-of-the-box forecasting is not meeting your business needs reach out today to get started predicting your revenue more accurately!
