Salesforce is doing a great job of managing the forecasting out of the box, however, the basic configuration has limitations. It is designed to satisfy the basic business need when using the Amount field on Opportunity by default. But businesses like SAAS, FINTECH, and other more complex models will require a number of custom fields to calculate different financial and reporting values to fit the business-specific need.
In order to allow forecasting on these custom financial fields, it is required to do more customisation on your Salesforce org and repoint from the default setting.
Prerequisites example:
- Collaborative Forecasting enabled
- Opportunity Splits & Team Selling enabled
- Role Hierarchy setup & active user setting for “Allow Forecasting”
- Opportunity stage Forecasting Categories
- Custom currency field “MARR Forecasting” (Mature Annual Recurring Revenue)
- The process to update “MARR Forecasting” with values
The custom “MARR Forecasting” field needs to be added to the Opportunity Split Types and then the ORG can be configured to create a new Forecast Type based on this new field. Further customisation will involve adding the appropriate fields to the forecasting tab reports and removing the default ones, setting the appropriate forecasting periods, forecasting adjustments for managers/owners, cumulative forecast rollups, currency, and quotas assignments.
Forecasting by using custom financial fields will give your business the flexibility and accuracy to report on the correct values and solve the problem with predictions and planning of the cycle from the pipeline to closed sales. Salesforce offers four forecast types to use, with an option for either Quantity or Revenue, but with the custom currency field case, you will be able to report only on Revenue for the types below:
- Opportunities
- Opportunity Splits
- Product Families
- Territories
To refine your forecasting even further, you should consider enabling Cumulative Forecast Rollups. This will ensure to combine of Opportunities from multiple forecast categories into cumulative amounts. By enabling this feature, the labels for the forecasting types will also change:
- Open Pipeline = (Pipeline + Best Case + Commit)
- Best Case Forecast = (Best Case + Commit + Closed)
- Commit Forecast = (Commit + Closed)
This reporting view gives a clear picture to the sales team to see the total numbers that they’re likely to bring in without combining the category totals themselves.
We always recommend to our clients to enhance the standard Forecasting Tab report by creating a new dashboard for different users such as Sales Person, Regional Head, and Top Management. These dashboards will contain a set of individual reports to reflect every detail that might be important. This can include the elements below represented in graphs and charts for better visual comparison:
- This FQ (Total Quota, Total Forecasts, and Total Achievement)
- This FY (Total Quota, Total Forecasts, and Total Achievement)
- Achievements in % or currency
- Quota achievement by month
- Forecast by pipeline category
.