Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast by Customer Group

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sales Forecast by Customer Group

hey, everyone, we're going to keep going on sales forecasting today.

We're going to get into the screen share and when you forecast obviously, you're normally focusing items over a period, but you want to forecast other things you might want to forecast by customer group, by geography, by salesperson, by various attributes and we're going to go into that.

We're going beyond the two dimensions, so in standard NAV you have items as lines and as columns you have period. This could be your coffee mug and over the period you have January, February, March, April, something like that. What if we want to categorize also customer group, I'm just going to call it CG, small, medium and large. You want to say how much you're going to be selling off a coffee mug in January for small customers, so that's a little bit tricky because we only have a two-dimensional screen but we're putting in three-dimensional information.

What we must do is fix January in place and look across at small, medium, large out and you'll see that in the application it's going to look a lot better. I can’t draw three dimensions very well or four or five. I don't know if anybody can do that but, in the system, we can show you how that works.

Let's dive into the system again, we're going to go into sales budgets and look at the sales forecast that we had created. Get a little bit deeper into it, so if I go into process, edit budget, I get on the y-axis, I get all of the items and out across on the x axis I have period and I can say what's show us lines and show us columns so the lines are items, columns are period and if I change that, for example, I come in here and say I want to see customer group as columns and then you can see that we have three different customer groups here as columns. I can change that back into wanting to see period and then I have the period, it filters on one quarter but I'm going to just change that so 10119 to 1231 19, so I don't know if you noticed but when we actually filtered on a particular customer group or we changed into different customer groups the amounts that we had typed in here, they disappeared, so and that's kind of the tricky thing of using this system, is that when you're actually inputting the item amounts in here, you have to have all the filters set or all the parameters set when you put in the amounts.

What I'm going to do is take away these amounts for the item and I'm going to re key them in and using customer group. I'm just going to start out by using January and in January I want to budget both the coffee mug and the packaged coffee beans and I want to do it for January for every single customer group. How do I do that?

First of all, I'll change the date here to only reflect January, so I'm only looking at January right here and then I am going to change show us columns into customer group like that, so I'm already filtering on January the system knows that here and I can put in the customer group so I'm going to say for large it's going to be 1500, medium it's going to be 1,000 and small is going to be 500. For packaged coffee beans it’s going to be two thousand fifteen hundred and seven fifty they're targeting larger clients.

Now I have categorized for January and you can see the total is here, so if I now change it to take a look at period, now I can see that it totals it up and I could take out the filter here and just put it for the whole year like that, now I see the whole year and you can see that it actually breaks it up. It's putting the total for each one of the customer groups.

You can see here, if I drill into the details, that it has the actual entries in the details, so now can be viewed by item by a customer group and by period, so it's three-dimensional and the tricky thing since we're actually in put it in like this, is that we are working with more than two dimensions, so you can't just make do with this matrix, you have to fix a point and I actually fixed the date and I worked with the customer group. I can show you again how that works but just put in the January date and this by the way works well in reporting so we when we're reporting actual to budget it, so do like this show columns hit customer groups and now they come out like that.