24. Setting a Default Display Forecast Currency
Collaborative forecasting supports multiple currencies. And so in order to demonstrate this, we need to enable multiple currencies in our organization. And you do that from company information. And this is something that you should have previously done or learned for the administrator certification. But I wanted to run you through this briefly here. And we will first enable multiple currencies and then we’ll set up the default currency for forecasting. So clicking Edit from the company information screen, we can select activate multiple currencies and then click Save.
And so now that we’ve got multiple currencies displayed, we can then go into the forecast settings page and we should see now an option for currency designation as far as the default currency goes. So we’ve got our forecasts enabled. We have our three forecast types that we previously created. One was defaulted and then the other two, the last one we dealt with was the revenue by territory where we got into the territory manager settings.
Now that we’ve enabled multiple currencies is we can set the forecast currency and this would be the default fault that it’s set under. So we’d either have the corporate currency, which is set to US dollars, or the forecast owner’s personal currency if they happen to have a different currency as their own default currency. I’m going to leave that though to US dollars and we’ll click Save. And so now the default currency setting on forecast is set to US dollars.
25. Configuring the Forecasts Hierarchy
Search for forecast and click on Forecast Hierarchy. Now I expanded all in order to show the forecast hierarchy and I’ve not enabled users in the hierarchy yet. And so what I need to do is I need to select a forecast hierarchy designation and usually this will match up by default with your role hierarchy. But this controls two different things and this determines how far forecasts roll up within the organization. And this has to do with subordinates and their opportunities that are in the pipeline and those rolling up to managers and they can see the total value of all opportunities in the pipeline for their subordinates, for example. And so let’s enable users here at the top level, which is the CEO level of our forecast category. We have no one available for available users.
I think that’s because I’ve not assigned myself the role, I don’t think I’ve assigned myself any role whatsoever. So let me go into my user account and do a little troubleshooting here and we’ll go to users and set up and then we’ll return back to forecast category here momentarily and you see that my role is blank. And we have other users that are in roles in the role hierarchy such as Jim Doe who’s Director of Direct Sales. So rather than assigning a role to myself, let me see if I can select and enable this role in the forecast hierarchy and see if Jim Doe comes up. So it’s Director of Direct Sales. So going back to forecast hierarchy. So, director of Direct Sales, enable users. And there’s Jim Doe. So you’ve got to select roles that correspond with the role hierarchy for the forecast hierarchy and then we’ll add him as an enabled user. So now he’s enabled for forecast in the role hierarchy. So now trying to decide where to put myself, probably above Jim Doe.
So let me do this. So I’ve got to allow forecasting for myself checked, so that will cause me to appear. But I also need to have a role set. So I’m just going to specify myself at the very top as CEO and click Save. I’ve also previously set myself up as a forecast manager. So I want to put myself up at the top or near the top for the forecast hierarchy. So now that I’ve assigned the CEO role to myself, I’ll go to Forecast Hierarchy and enable users here. And I’m an enabled user. So that already selected me. I thought I would have to select that and then I’m going to assign manager. Forecast manager is myself. So I set myself up as a forecast manager previously. Now I’m selecting that I’m the forecast manager in the forecast category and clicking Save. So now that I’ve got the forecast hierarchy set up, at least somewhat or initially, let’s look at our forecast. Now the opportunity revenue by territory is not pulling in. There’s further configuration I need to do because I don’t think that I’ve specified a territory for those opportunities.
26. Cumulative Forecast Rollups
So we previously set up cumulative forecast roll ups and we did that in forecast settings and that is done here. And the explanation for this is that these cumulatively add up or total up across multiple columns then and so what that looks like and this is that we’ve got Open pipeline, Best case, commit and closed only. And the details here is closed only would be just the closed one opportunities. If it’s closed lost then the revenue would be zero is why I’m saying it only includes the closed one. I guess it could theoretically show the closed loss but there’s no revenue there for that. The commit forecast would be those opportunities that are in the commit category plus closed opportunities.
So if you have some in each then the cumulative amounts will differ across those two columns and then best case forecast is where it includes best case, commit and closed if we’ve enabled cumulative forecast roll ups and then open pipeline is pipeline best case and commit but does not include closed opportunity. So if we look at open pipeline here we see that we’ve got different numbers for open pipeline versus best case, commit and closed only.
So what I want to do is uncheck this and show the difference that that makes. After I click Save we will confirm that we understand that this action will delete data, click change and delete. And so now if we go back and refresh we should see these columns have more unique numbers or potentially more zeros as well. And so we’ve got in our pipeline 619,000 and then we’ve got closed over here and that was the total of the four quarters and that was in quarter four of fiscal year 2018. Is this $1. 82 million of closed business? We’ve got different pipeline amounts here and this is the difference of this includes the total of the four quarters. Is this most recent or current quarter where we created that 4000 and something dollar opportunity and that was in quarter two of fiscal year 2019 at this point.
So what you can do is you can toggle this cumulative forecast roll ups back and forth through forecast settings to see the differences that makes and so the cumulative roll up and I feel like this explains it really well here. The default forecast display includes separate roll up columns for opportunities in each forecast category and those are the main four that we’ve been talking about. You can choose instead to show cumulative roll up columns which include opportunities in multiple categories and these are those multiple categories.
So if we enable that again and click Save we’ll return back to what we were used to seeing, understand that this will delete data and that’s basically deleting any adjustments that were made. And if we go back and refresh we will see then those cumulative numbers and they just gradually increase as you move from right to left from open pipeline all the way over to closed only. And so what you can do as well is you can start creating some additional opportunities or change the closed dates to see these move around and you can change the stage. So for example, what I’ll do is I’ll open one of these closed one ones that were in the past, I’ll move that into the future. And backstage it as well into a mid range stage here. And we’ll look under details for the close date.
And this would be the anticipated close date. I’m going to put this into the future and let’s put this with a date in the third or fourth quarter, I guess, of 2019. And so now if we go back to our forecast, clicking the forecast tab in my sales application, we see a little bit different numbers here for the pipeline, best case, the commit and the closed only. So there’s also this help article. This has to do with the cumulative forecast roll ups and collaborative forecasts. That’s a long title, but this gives you more details around how that works. And so you can see examples of individual versus cumulative and then the column names on the forecast page and how those differ and then the opportunities that roll up to it. So you can see with cumulative you’ve got opportunities that roll up based on the different category or column. And so that will give you more, greater and granular detail on how those cumulative forecasts roll up in the collaborative forecasts.
