20. Collaborative Forecasts
We’re going to spend a few lessons on forecasts. And to get things started, I’ve searched for Forecast and set up and we’ve got forecast hierarchy and forecast settings. Now, if I go to forecast settings, you’ll see that you’ll first need to enable forecast before they’ll show up in salesforce. I’m going to click on the app launcher though, and look under all items and see if we can find forecast tasks already. So there is a forecast tab here, but we’ve not enabled forecasts yet.
And so when you do click on the Forecast tab, it just tells you that it hasn’t been set up yet and ask your admin for help. So you are your admin, so you’re going to ask yourself for help. So we’re going to go into forecast settings and we’re going to enable forecasts in our right. And so once we’ve enabled forecasts, you can add up to four forecast types and the default is opportunity revenue and you can add up to three additional forecast types and we’ll go more in depth in these different things here momentarily.
But I want to give you a brief overview as we enable and also just talk at a high level about what forecasts even are, which is some of what a forecast is, is that it’s based on the gross roll up of a set of opportunities, you can forecast amounts determined by factors such as time period, forecast type, adjustments and currency. So it is a way of looking into or forecasting the future as far as yourselves on opportunities. And then beyond that, you can also enable forecast adjustments. You can even extend this down into opportunity owners to allow forecast users to adjust the amounts of their own forecasts, including the territory forecast they own. In order to do that, you enable owner adjustments.
And so I’m going to go ahead and enable both of those at this time and then as well enabling cumulative forecast roll ups. And so a few things to note before we go any deeper in this as it relates to forecast is that you may notice that it’s not only talking about forecasts but also territories as well. Now, there’s some overlap between forecast and territories.
Now remember, we’ve talked previously about territories and enterprise territory management in the security knowledge area of this certification. And if you have enterprise territory management set up, then you can also configure collaborative forecasting to work as well beyond the objects of forecasts and territories. Also, this deals with opportunities also. And so if we enable cumulative forecast roll ups, this has to do with the different types of opportunities in their stages and making those into high level forecast categories so that those categories could be closed commit, Best Case and Pipeline. And you can choose instead to show cumulative roll up columns which include opportunities in multiple categories if you enable cumulative forecast roll ups. So for closed only, this gives you a little detail of the different types of forecast categories. Closed only would be closed opportunities only the commit forecast would be commit plus closed opportunities. Best case forecast would be best case plus commit plus closed opportunities.
And then open pipeline is everything but the closed ones. These are different high level forecast categories so that managers and those that have access to forecast and salesforce can see what type of deals will be closed and what amounts, and can forecast that into the future as well. So now for configuring the default forecast display, you can set a forecast period that makes the most sense for your company. These settings apply to all forecast types. So you can set a forecast period of monthly, starting on a display of six to 15 months, or one to 15 months actually. So you could just forecast one month all the way to 15, and then the display here will show and explain what you’re setting up, basically. So the forecast period can be monthly or quarterly, and you could do the current quarter, for example, from eight quarters ago even.
So, you can set up your default forecast display into the past or into the future. So we’re going to do current quarter for four quarters and forecast period of quarterly, and then we’ll show quotas as well. And so we’ve got a lot going on here with territory management. All right, so let’s go ahead and save what we’ve set up for our forecast settings. I’m going to go ahead and acknowledge that I understand this action. And so if we’ve not previously set up forecasts, then this doesn’t really apply. But if you have been working with forecast, then you may want to think about what this is saying, which is that changing your forecast settings can delete things such as quotas and adjustment data and a lot of other things. So a decision not to be taken lightly if you’ve been already creating forecasts in your, but I trust that you’ve not done that yet. So let’s just click change and delete. All right, so we’ve set up our forecast settings. Let me go back into that now and let’s look at that. And we’ll be going more in depth and setting up forecasts in subsequent lessons.
Now, to further complicate things, we’re in a time frame of salesforce, retiring one type of forecasting and moving everyone over to a new type of forecasting. And those two different types of forecasting are known as collaborative forecasting versus customizable forecasting. So in the next lesson, I want to speak to you about some of the differences between the two and which is coming into the future and which is being retired. We’ll do that in the next lesson.
21. Customizable vs. Collaborative Forecasts
So this is Knowledge article 214168 and it’s a best practices article related to collaborative forecasts or Customizable forecasting and trying to determine which version is right for your organization. Now this has taken a turn over the past year because previously they hadn’t set a retirement time frame for Customizable forecasting. But you’ll note now that this Knowledge article has been updated saying Customizable Forecasting is scheduled for retirement for all customers as of summer 2020. Now, I want to mention Customizable Forecasting because it will have a shelf life on the exam for a while. And even beyond retirement, you may be tested on some features related to Customizable forecasting because you may inherit an organization that has customizable forecasting. So for at least the next several months into the next year, you may actually see Customizable Forecasting and or Collaborative Forecasting on the exam. And so for a full breakdown of the functional differences between the two, there’s this help article here. I will link to this Knowledge article and this Help article from this lesson and so be sure to check those out.
But I wanted to show you so that you can keep in mind which is which in that Customizable forecasting is retiring and collaborative forecasting is the current in the future. One way to know that is that collaborative forecasting is available in both Classic and Lightning experience, whereas customizable forecasting is only available in classic. And as we know, Salesforce is marching into the future with Lightning and things are being phased out as far as classic goes. And oftentimes there’s features that are only available in Lightning. And so if there’s something that’s only salesforce classic, it’s either it hasn’t been migrated to Lightning yet or it won’t be migrated. So collaborative forecasting is the newest iteration of forecasting in Salesforce and works in Classic and in Lightning. Now there’s a lot of different features here that oftentimes are available in both.
This column here is showing customizable forecasting and then as well collaborative. But there’s a note as well that for Customizable forecasting it’s scheduled retirement for all customers as a summer of 2020. After it’s retired, users can’t access the Customizable forecasting feature and its underlying data. And so organizations will have to over the next year be migrating to collaborative forecasts. So there’s a lot of features here that are available across both, but there’s some that are only available in collaborative forecasts. And you’ll tend to see more features available on the collaborative side because it’s an upgrade, it’s the new and improved, it’s the only one of the two that’s available in Lightning and the one not being retired. And so one of those differences is that in collaborative forecast you can set default forecast currency setting, many of the others are the same. And you’ll even see some things that are coming to collaborative that are in customizable but are not quite there yet, and some that are only available in certain additions. So like opportunity split forecast is only available in the collaborative forecasting, but it’s only available or it’s not available in professional edition.
Now, a lot of these different addition levels you don’t need to know to that point necessarily on the advanced Admin exam, but it is important to note that some of these are limited to certain additions and not available and professional you see that being a recurring theme as well. And you’re seeing these overlay split forecasts, those are supported in collaborative forecasting, for example. And then you’re starting to get into as well some of the information around product families and even product scheduling. And so there’s a note here that’s available for opportunity revenue and quantity forecasts. And so to round this out as well, we see that there’s quotas, quantity forecast and a lot of other settings here. And then also a thing to note and a point of deviation here is with territory management and this is grayed out here. And there’s also a big note, but this is related to how with customizable forecasting that works with the original territory management and then collaborative forecasting is working with the new enterprise territory management only.
And so Salesforce is really retiring both the original territory management and customizable forecasting with the summer 2020 release in favor of and expecting everyone to migrate over into collaborative forecasting and enterprise territory management. So if you see a question on the exam and there’s different options for answers, just know that collaborative forecasting and enterprise territory management go hand in hand. And conversely, the original territory management and customizable forecasting go together and those are the ones being phased out. And so another note here to further drive that home is this other link.
Can I use territory management features with forecasting features? The answer is yes, but it depends on what version you’re on. Same note here related to the retirement of customizable forecasting and the original territory management and how everything is moving over to enterprise territory management and collaborative forecasting. So summer 2020 is when the switchover happens. You may see that still on the exam even after that point. So I wanted to make you aware. And so now that we’ve talked about collaborative version versus customizable forecasting, we’re now going to start diving deeper into our forecast settings and we’ll start doing that in the next lesson.
