We are building a “sales forecast” application using Navision Jobs. The idea is that sales managers record all of their leads as a job with a certain “lead status”. They also record expected revenue for a certain period. The sales forecast report calculates expected revenue for specified periods. So far so good. The problem is how to handle ‘real’ revenue that is invoiced on the job. The expected revenue should be corrected for this. Does anyone has experience with sales forecasting or know of practical solutions in Navision?
Hi, It depends what level of forecast do you use. The easiest way to do Sales Forecast is create G/L accounts for different types of sale and use GL budget as sales forecast. You can use Department and Project as additional dimensions. You need to setup General Posting setup and system will post real sales amounts to the appropriate accounts. To compare you need only setup some Account Schedules. Valentin Gvozdev BMI Inc.
Yes, but we want to track and follow individual leads. E.g. a salesperson forecasts to sell ‘project’ A in period 1 and project B in period 2 etc. Now management want to see the expected sales for all sales persons. And in one month time, they want to see what has been invoiced and what is still expected. But a salesperson can’t just forget about previous leads if it turned out to be nothing. He will have to change the status of the lead, and we want to be able to track these changes. So we are using Jobs for each lead. This is convenient, beacuse you can invoice a job, write hours on it etc. But your idea isn’t so bad: perhaps I should use the Job budget functionality as a forecast tool. Thanks.
We run Goldmine which serves this purpose probably better than any other software. Additionally, I created a “Budget Header Table” and adjusted the budget lines and budget entries to reflect this. This allows us to have multiple “sales/projects” per job per year etc. This table includes most of the same fields that we would track in goldmine. So we can track actual vs sold for different profit centers/sales associates in different stages/by campaigns etc. A percentage completion allows us to better track backlog by month by salesperson as well as feeding weekly sale reports that show how much paper the sales associate has put out on the street etc. Each budget header also retains unique materal/labor/ sub markups for each project/sales and then uses these markups when posting costs so that the costs are jobcosted at the markups that were used(sold) on that particular project or sale. It is a fairly substantial modifaction but it brings a lot more flexability to the process. Ultimately I guess the asnwer your your question is that all of the numbers are Budgets that are either pending in some degree, verbal, signed & sold or lost (again for one of multiple reasons). I hope this helps. Mitch Rolsky Edited by - mitch rolsky on 1/5/01 3:17:36 AM
You say you run Goldmine. Does that mean that salespersons use Goldmine and you have a kind of interface to Navision? Or do salespersons have access to Navision as well? The Budget Header Table that you refer to, did you derive this from the Job Budget Table?
I would really like to hear more about this? Do you actually have an interface between Navision and Goldmine and if yes, how does it work? Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster
In Attain there is ‘Opportunities’. You can use this for sales forecast. Maybe you can link these opportunities to invoices to see real revenues per opportunity.