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- Forecast excel 2016 review how to#
- Forecast excel 2016 review software#
- Forecast excel 2016 review series#
If you are unfamiliar with the term damping factor its a reference to the weight placed on the most recent sales results. Next step is to add the “damping factor”. The input range will be your sales figures, so go ahead and highlight cells B2 to B13 into the allocated space. You’ll then be asked to fill out the following grid: Go ahead and click on Exponential Smoothing.
Forecast excel 2016 review how to#
How to do a Sales Forecast in Excel #1įirst is to use the built-in exponential smoothing tool provided by Excel.
Forecast excel 2016 review software#
Excel has its own exponential smoothing module, that, despite not being the most sophisticated piece of software available for forecasters it will more than suffice.
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įirst off you are going to need the right software to do the forecast. That’s all well and good, I hear you saying, but I still don’t really understand how to do a sales forecast.
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Hence, exponential smoothing! How to do a Sales Forecast : The Exponential Smoothing Technique Unlike other quantitative models, which use a fixed amount of the latest available data from the time series, the exponential smoothing technique incorporates data over a much greater period of time, that reduces in importance exponentially. While we need to place greater weight on more recent sales periods, we must also remember that trends and seasonality are cyclical and eventually come to an end. Or perhaps you are in the utility sector, which typically see increases in consumption of gas and electric over the Winter period as people start to turn up the heating. For example, If you work in retail then your are likely to see spikes around Thanksgiving and Christmas. The problem is that sales are rarely stable.ĭepending on the industry sales are often affected by trend or seasonality.
Forecast excel 2016 review series#
Other time series models (those that analyze sales over a set period of time in the past, to predict the future) such as run rate or simple moving average work well when the series is stable and not subject to much fluctuation or change. That’s because it’s consistently the most accurate method at forecasting sales. These include: historical growth rate, linear extensions, run rate, moving simple average and the exponential smoothing technique, and it’s the latter of these that we are going to focus on today. However, if you are fortunate enough to have some sales data on hand then you need to consider some of the quantitative methods of sales forecasting. These include: expert panels, the Delphi Method, market surveys and sales rep feedback. If you are just starting out at a company with little to no readily available sales data with which to conduct your forecast, you’ll need to look at some of the qualitative methods. There are several different techniques sales managers can explore when considering how to do a sales forecast.