(Beta) PSA Services Forecasting Overview

Services Forecasting combines revenue and cost forecasts, enabling you to achieve an accurate margin analysis, and helping you to make more informed decisions about your business.

For speed of retrieval, forecasts are stored in Analytics. You can edit your forecasts in WorkGrid and send snapshots of your edited forecasts to Analytics for comparison with your live forecasts.

To use Services Forecasting, you must:

• Generate the Services Forecast Live and Services Forecast Plans datasets in PSA
• Generate the Services Forecast Reporting dataset in Analytics, which combines the Services Forecast Live and Services Forecast Plans dataset

The resulting Services Forecast Reporting dataset enables services leaders to more easily analyze the services business by comparing snapshots of baseline forecasts with actual data and updates to forecasted projects.

Warning:

Services Forecasting is Beta functionality in this release. Further development is required to deliver a fully functional solution. Contact Certinia Support.

Revenue Forecasting is unaffected and continues to work in the same way as before.

Services Forecast Live Dataset

The Services Forecast Live dataset includes information about revenue, costs, and margin in PSA and is used as a basis for creating services forecast plans.

You can create a scheduled job to update the dataset at regular intervals or update it on demand from:

• The PSA Administration page
• A revenue forecast setup record

The Services Forecast Live dataset is created automatically in Analytics the first time a scheduled job to update the dataset is triggered, or the first time you update the dataset on demand by clicking Run Now.

When the update is run, the latest field values are extracted from PSA and the dataset is updated. For more information, see (Beta) Managing the Services Forecast Live Dataset.

Services Forecast Plans Dataset

The Services Forecast Plans dataset includes information about your services forecast plans from WorkGrid. The field values are extracted from your plans in WorkGrid by sending the plan to Analytics. The Services Forecast Plans dataset includes several fields related to the plan itself and also includes fields that match the Services Forecast Live dataset fields. For more information, see Fields on Datasets Created from Plans and (Beta) Services Forecast Live Dataset Output Fields.

The dataset must be manually created from the PSA Administration page or a revenue forecast setup record. When creating the dataset, we recommend you select PS Cloud Core Analytics as your destination app because:

• You can apply the Analytics View Only User permission set. For more information, see PS Cloud Core Analytics Permission Sets
• You can maintain data security by only sharing the app with relevant users

The data in the dataset is updated every time you send a plan to it from WorkGrid. For more information about how to send a plan to Analytics, see Send Plans to Analytics.

For more information, see (Beta) Creating the Services Forecast Plans Dataset.

Services Forecast Reporting Dataset

The Services Forecast Reporting dataset combines data from the Services Forecast Live and Services Forecast Plans datasets created in PSA. It also stores all plan data that has been sent to Analytics from WorkGrid. For more information, see (Beta) PS Cloud Core Analytics Services Forecasting Overview.