Running Services Forecasts

Services forecasts use snapshots of live data in your org to provide you with up-to-date information.

You can:

Tip:

To run a forecast on demand, you can also click Recalculate Revenue Forecast on the Services Revenue Forecasting workspace. For more information, see Services Revenue Forecasting Workspace.

In addition to creating forecast records, the services forecast process automatically performs cleanup steps to delete stale forecast records. This cleanup occurs whether you schedule the process to run at set intervals or run it on demand. The process automatically removes forecast records for deleted projects, opportunities, and accounts. Depending on your setup, it might also delete forecast records for opportunities converted to projects and for projects that are no longer active or included in forecasting. If you are filtering by region, practice, or group when scheduling the process or running it on demand, only the forecast data that matches the selected region, practice, or group is deleted.

For opportunities converted to projects, you can regenerate the deleted forecast records for an opportunity by running the forecast process again from that specific opportunity record. However, the next on-demand or scheduled run deletes these regenerated records unless the Disable Opportunity Forecast Cleanup checkbox is selected on the active services forecast setup record.

For more information about the setup and the Disable Opportunity Forecast Cleanup checkbox, see Setting up Forecasting and Services Forecast Setup Fields. For more information about running a revenue forecast for a specific opportunity, see Running Opportunity Revenue Forecasts.

Prerequisites

When scheduling services forecasts or running them on demand from the Services Forecast Setup tab or the PSA Administration tab, only the following projects and opportunities are considered:

  • Active projects that have:

    • A start date and an end date
    • The Include In Forecasting checkbox selected

  • Opportunities that have the Is Services Opportunity checkbox selected and do not have:

    • An active project associated with them
    • A type of Closed / Lost in the Stage field
Note:

To be included in a services forecast run, a project must be active. Inactive projects are, however, included in forecasts that are run manually from project records. For more information on running a forecast manually from a project record, see Running Project Revenue Forecasts.

Setup

Use the following fields on the active services forecast setup record to define the data to include or exclude from your forecasts:

  • To exclude opportunities from services forecast jobs, select Exclude Opportunities.
  • To exclude opportunity probability from services forecast jobs, select Exclude Probability on Opportunities.
  • To include service credits in services forecast jobs, ensure Include Services Credits is selected.
  • To exclude specific account records from services forecast jobs, configure the Exclude from Forecast Account Field option and then select the relevant checkbox on the account records you want to exclude.

For more information on the settings available for running and scheduling forecasts, see Services Forecast Setup Fields and Scheduling Forecasts.

Permissions

The following permissions are required when running services forecasts:

  • To set or change the settings on the services forecast setup record, you must have been granted permission to configure the setup.
  • To run a revenue forecast, you must have been granted permission to run a services forecast.

  • To schedule a revenue forecast, you must have been granted the following:

    • Salesforce permission to schedule an Apex job
    • Permission to run a services forecast

For more information, see Permissions.

Troubleshooting

To find out whether any projects, opportunities, or accounts in a services forecast job have failed:

  • For projects, create a list view on the Project tab that includes the Services Forecast Processing Status field. For information on creating a list view, see the Salesforce Help.
  • For opportunities and accounts, create a tab for the Revenue Forecast Batch Status object, then create a list view on the tab that includes the Revenue Forecast Processing Status field. For information on creating a custom object tab, see the Salesforce Help. For information on the Revenue Forecast Batch Status object, see Revenue Forecast Batch Status Fields.

You can then sort the Services Forecast Processing Status column in the project list view and the Revenue Forecast Processing Status column in the Revenue Forecast Batch Status related list on opportunities and accounts to easily identify the records with Error in that field.

To view details of an error, go to the relevant project, opportunity, or account and check the Revenue Forecast Batch Logs related list.

Tip:

The RFP_EnqueuerCallable, RFO_EnqueuerCallable, and RFA_EnqueuerCallable scheduled jobs find suitable projects, opportunities, and accounts and mark them as Pending for Revenue Forecasting. If your jobs are failing, an administrator can reduce the batch size by changing the value in the following fields on the active services forecast setup record:

  • Project Scheduler Batch Size
  • Opportunity Scheduler Batch Size
  • Account Scheduler Batch Size

For more information, see Services Forecast Setup Fields.