About Forecast Method

As someone that works in Marketing, I spend a lot of time in Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel forecasting, especially at the end of every month, quarter and year.

When I worked in ecommerce, it would be how many visits or sales my channels would bring in. 

When I worked in tech, it would be how many leads and opportunities my team would generate.

As a leader in marketing, I have to forecast the amount of spend I would need to hit target goals or on a weekly basis track spend pacing to ensure we didn’t go overbudget.

Needless to say, forecasting has been a big part of my job and while I have continued to hone my forecasting skills & techniques, it’s still a long and tedious process and especially in recent years where macroeconomic and geopolitical risks can greatly change the trajectory of one’s business performance.

We all know it’s a pretty manual process to do forecasting since you often need to pull historical data, build pivot tables and then look at statistical trends. I figured I’d try to make the process a little easier by automating some of the calculations when using historical data inputs. The calculations we use will be based on several different types of forecasting methods. While I can’t claim that our forecasting methods will always be accurate since I don’t know anything about your specific business, the methods used in our add-on are proven methods that have worked for me over the years.