Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast

Hey everyone, we're going to dive into forecasting. It's the beginning of the year and what you would probably want to do maybe before the beginning of the year but we're going to just go into it now. It is planning your sales and possibly plan your purchases according to sale, profits, etc.  

In Business Central we have something called sales budgets, I mean, forecast I like forecasts or planning better, but it's called sales budget, anyways we'll take it as it is. This good word for my budget versus actual but what it allows you to do is forecast how much you're going to sell of each product in a period for each period. You could do that by dimensions, so you can kind of slice it out and I'm going to start diving into that for a couple of sessions so you can understand really how to set up the forecast and how to view it as you're selling versus what you thought you would be selling for categories or maybe geography, sales person or something like that. 

Sales budget
Let's get into the system to get into the sales budgets, I just click on the search and I go into sales budgets. I've created a new line here called 2019 sales forecast and I'm going to create an item forecast for 2019.  If I get into process, edit budgets, I get a matrix where the where I see on the left-hand side a list of items and out to the right hand - side I get all the dates. 

I've actually set it here to be viewed by quarter, so this is each quarter for the year, here I have second quarter 2018, 3rd 2018 fourth, etc. I'm really only interested in 2019 so how do I filter that out here rather than all we're scrolling back and forth? I can go here in the date filter and just type in 19..3 119 if I do that, now it's filtering only on these four. With the coffee mug we are expecting to sell about 5,000 units of coffee mug in the first quarter, then six thousand in the second quarter, eight thousand in the third and finally, ten thousand in the fourth. 

Up here, you can see that I am typing in quantity it says here show value as quantity, I could have changed that into having the sales amount, cost amount or quantity. so I can basically plan by these three values, but I want to do quantities because that makes the most sense to me and it also kind of drives the inventory. Let's go ahead and say that with the coffee beans here we're going to sell packaged coffee beans, let's do the finished goods, how many pounds of that? we're going to sell 2000 in the first, twenty five hundred and second three thousand and then 3500, alright so now I have a plan, what I'm going to sell of these two items and it's saved.

Now, regardless of how I'm going to do it with you know, with what customer, what sales person and what geography etc; this is just purely looking at the item for the entire company. but we can actually budget using individual attributes like geography, customer or even item categories, etc. In order to do that we have to use dimensions, you can see here the system is ready to be set up for dimensions, there is a budget dimension filter right here and we're going to take a look at that in the next video.