27. Sharing Forecasts
You could potentially be asked on the exam about sharing forecasts and question if that’s even possible or not. So as a manager, as far as the forecast manager, I’m able to share forecasts, and from the forecast tab, you can click the Share button and this will open up the Share forecast window. I can search for user to share this with and then give them forecast access to either view only or view and edit and click Share. And so this then shares my forecast with the other user that I specify. So that’s a manual way of sharing a forecast. That’s something that you can do and share your forecast with other users as well. So keep that in mind. You may see that pop up on the exam.
28. Custom Fiscal Year Considerations
Final consideration that we need to take into account as it relates to forecasts is the ability to set custom fiscal years. And you notice in this forecast we have these different quarters for these fiscal years. But what if you want to set a custom fiscal year structure? And so there is a help article here called Customize the Fiscal Year Structure. And there’s also some warnings about not only changing the length of a fiscal year and the impact that that has, but also a lot of other warnings about durations and what you must do and how to do this as well. And in order to change your fiscal year structure, you can go into fiscal year inside of company settings.
And the way that this works is that you specify the start month for your fiscal year period. You can either do a standard fiscal year, which follows the Gregorian calendar starts on the first day of any month you choose, or a custom fiscal year. This follows a custom structure that you define. For example, you could have four quarters with 13 weeks per quarter in a four, four, five pattern or 13 periods per year, for example. So to specify a custom fiscal year, you would select that radio button. Now, there’s a lot of considerations here and this is what I was looking for in the help article that I didn’t see spelled out. And here’s the important point to make is that enabling custom fiscal years is not reversible after you enable custom fiscal years, you cannot revert to standard fiscal years. However, you can define your custom fiscal years to match a standard fiscal year.
So you could create a custom fiscal year that is mimicking a standard fiscal year. But the main point is there’s a point of no return in this. So if you want to do that, you can check the checkbox and say enable custom fiscal years. I’m not going to do that. I just want to show you and leads you up to that point. And the main point of this lesson here, as we round out this first knowledge area of this course for Sales cloud applications, is that salesforce does have the ability of having either standard fiscal year or custom fiscal year. And then as well, you can specify the start month for your fiscal year. Many companies start their fiscal year in April and then as well, many start in July. I’ve seen those pretty common. And the fiscal year is based on either the ending month or the starting month, for example.
So I’m going to cancel out of this though, and just have my standard fiscal year start with January and not mess with that. But I wanted to make you aware that you can set up custom fiscal years and that cannot be reverted back once you’ve enabled that. So now that we’ve talked a lot about forecasts and territories and a lot of the ins and outs around opportunities and products and price books and account hierarchies and forecast. Hierarchies.
We have completed all the concepts that you need to know in order to answer the questions on the exam related to sales cloud applications on the Advanced Admin exam. So now it’s time to move into our next knowledge area and that service cloud application I’ll see on the other side as I introduce you to that knowledge area.
