Sales Forecasts by Items

There are two types of sales forecasts in Rise Business:

To enable sales forecasts by items, go to Master data and settings – Budgeting and planning and select the Sales forecasts checkbox.

With sales forecasts by items, you can do the following:

To create a sales forecast:

6. On the Goods tab, specify a list of items to sell and their quantity. You can fill in the document automatically using the following commands:

If Fill in by sources population option is selected in the plan profile:

• Click Fill goods > By filter... to fill items using goods selection tool by any parameters (item, warehouse, price, retail format, and so on). OR
• Click Fill goods > By custom rule. It will open the Fill in plan form where you can set the data source to fill in the quantity. The sources for filling in the quantity are planning data sources.

If Fill in using formula population option is selected in the plan profile, click Fill in goods. It will open the Fill in plan form where you can:
1) Fill in items:

• By goods purchased by all customers. Adds all items purchased by all customers.
• From formula. Items will be received from the operands specified in the formula.
• By filter. Allows you to fill in items by the arbitrary filter set in the document.

2) Fill in quantity using the formula.

To import lines from the spreadsheet:

• Click the Import from external file icon.
• In the import from external file form, paste data copied from the spreadsheet.
• Click Next. The system will automatically parse all the data pasted and fill in the form with the system master data.
• Review and amend the information and click Move and close. The system will automatically fill in the form.

7. If sales prices are applied in the plan profile, specify the Price for each line OR click Change prices, specify the required Price type and click Refill prices to specify prices automatically.

8. On the Payment tab (available if sales prices are applied in the plan profile), enter the payment schedule. The total amount of planned payments must match the total amount of goods on the Goods tab.

9. Set the document status to Confirmed.
10. Click Post and close.

You can break down sales forecast by categories to sales forecast by items using distribution standards and seasonal indexes.

We are planning to sell 10,000 items of the Women clothes product category.

The category contains 5 items. The items can be of two colors (black and white) and sizes from 42 to 46. According to statistics, among the sold items, 60% are black and 40% are white. For colors, the situation is as follows: size 42 - 10% of sales, 43 - 15%, 44 - 35%, 45 - 20%, 46 - 20%. When we create sales forecasts, we want to take into account these two parameters (the size and color). So, we need to register distribution standards. Let's do it step by step.

First, we need to create additional attributes for our item variants. There will be two: size and color. To create them:

Now open item variants of each item in your category and map additional attributes to variants as it is done on the figure below:

Finally, create distribution standards for the system to decompose the sales forecast by category to the sales forecast by items using the specified percentage:

To decompose the sales forecast by categories to items, the system multiplies the standards as follows: 10 000 / 5 * 60% * 20% = 240 black items of size 46. This logic applies to all items of the category. The total number of items in the resulting sales forecast will be 10,000.

To create a sales forecast by item based on sales forecast by category:

9. On the Payment tab (available if sales prices are applied in the plan profile), enter the payment schedule. The total amount of planned payments must match the total amount of goods on the Goods tab.
10. Set the document status to Confirmed.
11. Click Post and close.

If no distribution standards are created, the system will split categories into items evenly.

The workflow is as follows:

You will need to create two scenarios, one with the Year frequency and one with the Month frequency.

Then create seasonal indexes:

For example: the company sells consulting services. In the first month of the quarter, demand for consulting services is 3 times higher than in the other months. In that case we create the Consulting services seasonal group and specify 3 for months number 1, 4, 7, 10 and 1 for all other months.

To apply seasonal indexes to required items, specify the seasonal group in the Item card.

For each forecast, you will need not only scenario, but also plan profiles.

For the annual sales forecast, we can create a simple plan profile. It will be filled manually, so population option is not important.

For the monthly sales forecast, the number of default periods is 12. The forecast will be filled based on the annual forecast, so we select Fill in by sources population option and set it up (click By default filling rule):

Specify the Sales forecast as a data source.

Then set up its settings. In the settings, specify the annual sales forecast that will be the basis for our monthly forecast, select the Apply seasonal indexes checkbox and delete Period from Grouping. Otherwise, the entire annual forecast will be grouped in the first period (the first month of the year).

To create an annual forecast:

To create a monthly forecast:

You can monitor the actual execution of the sales forecast and payments by business units using the Sales forecast fulfillment by business units report in Planning > Budgeting and Planning reports. The following report options are provided:

Sales forecasts without specifying a business unit are shown in reports separately from forecasts by business units.

You can get summary data on the sales forecast in the Sales forecast print form (click the Sales forecast button).