The art of business forecasting

Regardless of size, every organization needs to look to the future. Your future plans and prospects will significantly impact your current strategies, and it's essential to forecast appropriately to make informed decisions, manage budgets, and build for long-term success.

What is business forecasting?

Business forecasting is the process of making educated estimations about the future of your business. It's essential to any business plan and can help you identify opportunities, manage risks, and make better decisions. You can create forecasts for any aspect of your business, including sales, costs, cash flow, profit margins, market share, and customer demand.

Business forecasting allows you to:

• Gain valuable insight into what might happen in the future so that you can prepare
• Identify potential problems or opportunities before they arise, allowing you to take action before they become a crisis
• Compare your forecasts with actual results to evaluate your performance and make improvements

The importance of business forecasting

Forecasting helps CFOs, finance managers, and other business leaders to consider the expected outcome of different courses of action and make better decisions. Forecasting can be used for many purposes, including:

Planning: Forecasts can help plan for upcoming events like seasonal changes and holidays.

Decision making: Forecasts can provide valuable insight into what might happen in the future if specific actions are taken.

Budgeting: Forecasts provide a way to predict costs, including revenue and expenses.

Risk management: If you know where your costs are coming from and how much they will change over time, it becomes easier to manage your risk when things go wrong.

In addition, businesses use forecasting techniques such as scenario planning and trend analysis to make better future decisions.

Key techniques of business forecasting

Qualitative models

The qualitative model is a simple forecast that uses judgment to predict future events. Qualitative models can forecast consumer behavior, market trends, and supply and demand in the short term. These models are based on expert opinion or instinct and rely on human judgment. The results of these models will not be precise, but they can provide helpful insight into what may happen in the future.

Quantitative models

Quantitative models use mathematical formulas to predict future outcomes. Unlike qualitative models, quantitative models are precise and accurate because they use data from previous years to predict future results. The results from quantitative models can be used to determine probabilities of different outcomes occurring in certain situations. Quantitative models vary depending on whether they are based on past data or current information from current events happening in the present time.

Types of business forecasts

General business forecasting:
This type of business forecast aims to figure out the overall market climate. Several types of businesses and industries use general business forecasts to determine the business climate for a future date.

Financial forecasting:
The goal of financial forecasting is to gain a clear understanding of your company's future. As part of the analysis, assets, and liabilities are weighed, accounts payable and receivable are calculated, operating costs are assessed, and the capital structure and cash flow are assessed.

Accounting forecasting:
Based on past and present data, accounting forecasts estimate how much your business will spend on raw materials, inventory, person-hours, utilities, rent, and insurance.

Demand forecasting:
As a business, you will want to use demand forecasts to predict what the market needs and wants, alongside a robust sales strategy, to determine how your business can capitalize on those needs.

Sales forecasting:
Based on sales data, a sales forecast estimates future sales, whether overall or of a specific product or service. Forecasting sales allow you to plan for the future regarding labor, resources, cash flow, inventories, and investment capital.

Capital forecasting:
A capital forecast is based on projections for future assets and liabilities and expectations about the number of liquid funds available.

Supply forecasting:
Supply forecasting works with demand forecasting to ensure sufficient resources are available when needed.

Sources of data for forecasting

Primary sources

Primary sources are those that collect data directly from customers and stakeholders to predict their behavior in the future. They can be internal or external, but they're still considered primary because they provide real-time information about customer behavior. Primary sources include customer interviews, social media monitoring, surveys, focus groups, and customer reviews.

Secondary sources

These are secondary sources that provide data collected by other organizations or agencies. For example, if you want to forecast product sales in the next six months, you may look at sales figures of similar products sold in the past six months by another company.

Business forecasting process

Choose an issue to address
The first step in business forecasting is choosing an issue you want to forecast. You should select an issue that can be measured easily, such as sales volume, profit margin, etc. For example, if you want to forecast your revenue, you might need to measure gain by the number of items sold or the price per item sold, etc.

Create a data plan
The next step after choosing an issue is creating a data plan to help us collect relevant data for our forecasting process and ensure that we won't miss any critical information from various sources like comprehensive historical data, internal documents, website analytics, etc.

Pick a forecasting technique
Once you've defined your needs and gathered the necessary data, it's time to decide which forecasting method is best for your business. You can choose which method will work best for you using your industry knowledge and best judgment.

Analyse the data
Once you've collected your data, it's time to analyze it. This is where you check for outliers and missing values, then calculate averages and trends over time. Your goal is to find patterns that will help you predict future performance with reasonable accuracy.

Verify your findings
After analyzing the data and finding any trends or patterns, verify those findings by checking them against current conditions. Comparing them against historical performance metrics and other industry benchmarks related to similar companies in similar industries can help identify any inaccuracies in your forecast.

Business forecasting methods

The Naïve Approach

The naïve approach is the simplest forecasting method. It is based on historical data and doesn't attempt to account for any changes that might affect future sales. The naïve approach assumes that past performance accurately predicts future performance.

The naïve approach is most appropriate when only a few factors affect sales, and those factors don't change from year to year. For example, if a company sells a single product that doesn't change in quality or price, it can use the naïve approach because there are no factors affecting sales other than past sales.

The Average Approach

The average approach is also known as "the mean" or "the median" method. This method uses a weighted average of past performance to forecast future performance. The weighting depends on how long each piece of information was gathered, with more recent information being given more weight than older information.

The average approach is most useful when you have a large amount of historical data with varying reliability (some pieces may be more reliable than others). If you want an idea of your sales next year but don't want to try new methods or assumptions, this might be your best option.

Time Series Analysis

This method uses historical data to predict future patterns. It is useful when there are clear trends in the data, but it can be inaccurate if there are no clear trends or if too many variables affect the data.

Market Research

Market research involves collecting what customers think about current products and services. It can be done through surveys or focus groups, which allow companies to get customer feedback to improve their products and services based on consumer needs and wants.

Delphi Method

This method is used by experts in a particular field who will provide their prediction on what might happen next. It works well for industries with little or no data available for analysis.

Benefits of integrating expense management software with business forecasting tools

You can better view your company's financial health by combining expense management software with business forecasting tools. Expense management software allows you to track your spending and create a budget tailored to your needs.

Benefits of integrating expense management software with business forecasting tools:

Improved accuracy of financial projections
The ability to forecast expenses accurately helps companies improve their overall financial performance. This is especially true when it comes to budgeting for operating costs. Expense management software enables businesses to track and monitor spending in real time, providing up-to-date information on how much has been spent on each line item category during the year. Business forecasting tools can then use this data to generate forecasts based on actual results.

Enhanced visibility into expenses and cash flow
By integrating expense management software with business forecasting tools, you can better understand how your organization's operating costs impact its cash flow position — at any time. This allows managers to make informed decisions about where they should focus their attention so they don't run out of money before the month's or quarter's end.

Reduction in errors and omissions
The ability to better track expenses leads to fewer errors and omissions, which translates into more accurate forecasts. This is because the information provided by an expense management platform is more reliable than manual recording.

Convenient expense tracking across multiple departments
If multiple departments within your organization generate their own expenses, it can be difficult for one person or department to track them effectively. This results in inefficient use of company funds and loss of money due to inaccurate expense reporting. A good expense management tool should allow you to track expenses across all departments (even all entities in a group) to see how they spend their money, which would've been impossible if managed separately.

Efficient expense approval workflows
Organizations often have multiple approval levels for expense reports, which can lead to unnecessary delays and bottlenecks in the reimbursement process. Integration with expense management software reduces these bottlenecks by enabling employees to submit their expenses directly from the mobile app or desktop application without going through a lengthy approval process at each step.

Improved insight into non-recurring expenses
These are the kind of infrequent expenses, such as legal fees or insurance premiums, which are not included in your regular budgeting process but still need to be accounted for in some way. Integrating your forecasting tool with an expense management solution enables you to forecast these costs accurately so that they don't come as a surprise later on when they materialize unexpectedly.

Final thoughts

In today's business environment, where competition is fierce, and it's difficult to predict customer demand accurately, forecasting often plays a crucial role in running a successful business. Forecasting can help companies decide where to focus their resources and how to allocate their budgets for planning purposes.

In addition, forecasts determine how much inventory or other resources should be purchased, what projects should be started or stopped, and which products should be developed. Integrating expense management software with business forecasting tools can help businesses make more informed decisions about their finances by providing more accurate data that can help them forecast more accurately.

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