Actual vs Forecast Lines

Warning:

We're retiring the Forecast Revenue feature and it'll be deactivated in a future release, no sooner than 12 months from now. We'll continue to support the Forecast Revenue feature, but recommend that you now:

• Use the Revenue Scheduled By Period report in the RM Report Templates folder.
• Build your own reports on recognition schedule data to gain insight into a company's future revenue position.

Work with your administrator to start using recognition schedules and related reports. For information about migrating to recognition schedules, see Migrating from Actuals to Recognition Schedules.

Alternatively if Revenue Management is integrated with PSA, you can use PSA's Revenue Forecasting feature.

Revenue Management uses your saved recognition transactions and revenue forecast transactions to calculate the variance between actual and forecast values. Variance values are calculated by subtracting the forecast value from the actual value:

Variance = Actual - Forecast

Variance values are stored using Actual vs. Forecast Lines. You can view a record's Actual vs Forecast variance as a chart on the Details Panel which is accessible from the Recognize Revenue and Forecast Revenue pages.

Enabling the Actual vs Forecast Functionality

If you want Actual vs Forecast records to be created, you must enable the Use Actual vs Forecast Feature field in the Revenue Management Settings custom setting.

If you want Actual vs Forecast records to be created automatically when a recognition or forecast transaction is created and saved, you must also enable the Create Actual vs Forecast in real time field in the Revenue Management Settings custom setting. If you do not enable this field, you will need to create Actual vs Forecast records manually using the Manage Actual vs Forecast feature. See Manage Actual vs Forecast Records for details.

The Actual vs Forecast Category field in the Revenue Management Settings custom setting specifies the category of forecast values that are included in Actual vs Forecast records. This category defaults to Expected. If you create forecast values for another category, such as Worst, revenue forecast transactions will be created for those values (for example, so that you can report on them) but the values will not be included in Actual vs Forecast records. You can change the Actual vs Forecast Category custom setting to use another category if you prefer.

Reporting

You can use Actual vs Forecast lines to create your own variance reports using standard Salesforce reports. See the Salesforce Help for more information.