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Sales Forecasting tool

Easy and Simple tool

Forecasting tool

There are many methods of forecasting sales

This can be a small handy tool for you to forecast sales using trendlines in excel

Download excel by clicking the link here!or , access @downloads on my blog LCDing

How to use the tool ?

First read “Readme” sheet in excel. If it makes sense , try it!

What you need is at least 2-3 years of monthly data to forecast – the more the merrier!

Follow 3 simple steps

Step 1

Just input first month of the past sales data you have in the format mmm-yyyy in the cell E10e.g: January 2006 as Jan-2006

Rest of the months’ names are automatically generated

Step 2

First delete dummy data given in the worksheet in column F from F10 to F81

Now,input sales from cell F10 …till the present month(maximum of 180 Months)

As the number of cells in the column taken for computations are 192, some cells in the column may be found empty. Leave them as it is…

One Last step to read the forecast of sales!

Step 3

Bingo!Forecasts are here!

Caution !

Forecasting works on a principle that the future will be like present ( Similar conditions may prevail ! )

The hope is that near future is not going to be

radically different! ( However, who can predict economic meltdowns and Tsunamis ? )

It is idiocy to forecast sales of next 5 Years when you are not sure about the present month sales.

Forecasts of distant months (more than 12 Months) could go grossly wrong.

Despite all, you may find the tool useful !!!

Best fit Trendline and seasonal indexing is used for forecasts.

Test the strength of other trendlines using the dropdown option here.

Seasonal Variations are automatically computed to give “Final Forecast with Seasonal Trend”

The ‘How’ of this tool ..

If want to check How data is getting populated - click the

grouping button “+”

This is Group & Ungroup button

This is where the computations are done for various trendlines

Here are the formulae at the bottom of the sheet

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