Forecasts
A forecast predicts where your sales or orders will end up by the close of the current week, month, quarter or year, based on your store’s history.
How It Works
Each forecast covers one metric, for one period, for all your customers or one segment:
- Metric: Sales or Orders. Sales is Total Sales, worked out the same way as the Total Sales report.
- Period: Week, Month, Quarter or Year. The forecast always runs to the end of the current one.
- Customer segment: All customers, or any standard or custom segment.
By the Numbers starts you with a Monthly Sales Forecast. Stores with Pulse also get a Weekly Sales Forecast. You can rename these built-in forecasts, but not delete them or change their metric, period or segment.
Create a Forecast
- Open Forecasts, under Planning in the navigation.
- Click New Forecast.
- Give it a Name. A Description is optional.
- Choose a Customer segment, a Metric and a Period.
- Click Create.
How the Prediction Is Made
Forecasts use Prophet, a statistical forecasting model. It learns from your daily sales or orders over the last 25 months, up to yesterday. It picks up:
- your weekly pattern, such as busier weekends
- your yearly pattern, such as a strong December
- changes in your overall trend
It doesn’t know about events on its own. A sale or launch you’re planning won’t show in the forecast until it shows in your sales. A holiday that moves date each year isn’t picked up either.
A forecast needs at least 90 days with an order in the last 25 months. With less history, it predicts nothing: Forecast remaining stays at zero, and Total is only what you’ve sold so far.
The prediction is worked out again each time you open the forecast, from sales up to 10 minutes old.
Reading a Forecast
Open a forecast with View to see 3 numbers for the current period:
- Current: actual sales or orders so far, today included.
- Forecast remaining: the prediction from tomorrow to the end of the period.
- Total: the two added together. The change beside it compares your actuals so far with the same point in the previous period.
On the Forecast Trend chart, the solid line is your actual sales or orders, and the dashed line is the forecast.
From about a day after you create a forecast, the chart also shows a shaded band for the days still to come. The band spans the highest and lowest predictions the forecast has made for each day over the last 12 weeks, and a second, fainter dashed line marks the middle.
A wide band means the forecast has been changing its mind. The band isn’t a range the result is sure to fall in.
What It Means for You
A forecast tells you whether you’re on track before the period ends. If the Total is short of where you need to be, you still have time to act: run a campaign, send an email, or promote a product.
Attach a goal to a forecast to set a target and see how close the forecast comes. Use Add goal on the forecast’s page.
A goal set as a total amount is drawn on the chart as a Goal Pace line, the amount to reach each day, or each month on a yearly forecast. A goal set as a percentage growth isn’t drawn.
Treat a forecast early in the period with care. With little of the period gone, most of the Total is prediction.
To keep an eye on a forecast, click Pin to Dashboard on its tile. The Overview Dashboard already shows your Monthly Sales Forecast.
Pulse’s daily sales chart uses your built-in Weekly or Monthly Sales Forecast. Pulse’s Looking Ahead card and Copilot make their own store-wide sales forecasts instead, and don’t read the forecasts on this page.
Related
- How to use Goals: set targets on a forecast.
- Total Sales: the sales figure a Sales forecast predicts.
- Understanding the Inventory Forecast Dashboard: predicted units and revenue for each product.