Whether you are a manufacturing concern or a service organization, Sales Projection is a gearing act for any concern. Stakeholders / General Public will always look for your sales to determine/evaluate the business and its growth. Meanwhile, your revenues and expenses are dependent on what you forecast for sales of a particular period.
When you talk about Creating a Forecast of Sales, you are into creating an expected(70%) but logical genuine estimation/ guess for your revenues (sales). It is a universally known fact that your forecast can never be expected to be 100%, since it’s a guess on the facts and figures of your recent last period. It may be higher or vice versa. Creating a forecast does not need to have certified or diploma holders to create it. It’s all about your research, your reasonable and factual approach motivated employees, etc. on whom you forecast your business revenue generation.
Here is a preview of this Monthly Sales Projections Template,
Here is the download link for the above-mentioned Monthly Sales Projections,
The sales forecast should reveal sales for a period of 12 months at least and with the following year should go up to 5 years mostly an accumulation of 3 years is enough.
If the business you are dealing with has different channels of generating revenues (sales) you need to detail them separately and if the channels are more than 10, you just need to amalgamate the revenues to make it simpler. You are required by reasonable and bit concise when into business planning as it is not actual but a forecast.
There are a few markable and considerable points to be taken into account while Creating a Sales Forecast. For instance, start forecasting from a unit sale ( not all businesses are unit-based), secondly, use past data (facts and figures) to determine your basis of forecast. The last recent year’s sales figures and factors will help you forecast more viable and accurate ( like the projections being done through analysis and ratio techniques). Furthermore, when you are forecasting sales for a new product/service, you look for factors for your accurate and reasonable guesses in forecasting its sales. Here you decide upon the factors of sales categorically but if you are launching a new thing then your analysis will be based on the sales of something similar to it in the market. The price of the project is again an important step towards your forecasting. Since the sales you are forecasting are about 12 months the prices should also be annually projected.
Additionally, the average costs, also need to be projected as usually sales less cost of sales (gross margin) is what is being dealt with. As cost of sales is the purchase price of your sales. Hence per unit sale into average per unit cost calculates the cost of sales. This will give you a true forecasting track.
Besides this, we are aware that the unit sales method cannot be applied to all businesses for creating forecasts of sales. But yes instead of units we might take currency too. This is all about how you want to decide about your business.
