Forecasting Frustration

[maggiethelab]

I'm evaluating SugarCRM Pro 4.5 for our company; we're considering rolling this out to what would end up being about 50 sales professionals across 3 US and 2 international offices. I'm extraordinarily frustrated.

1) I've set up employees along with their 'reports to'.
2) I've created teams, for example LA Sales and assigned employees to these teams;
3) I've created monthly time periods for 2007, calendar months from Jan through Dec;
4) I've created quotas for each of the sales professionals.

I have entered 2 opportunities for the month of October and assigned $ amount, % probability for closing and expected close dates. I updated one of these to be closed - won sale.

All I want to do now is show an actual vs. quota report.

I'm logged in as as the manager of the LA Office and I can see the quotas I've set up for each of the LA Office employees. I go into Forecasts, and I see my employees listed, however the drop down for Time Periods is blank - I cannot see any of the time periods I've set up.

I cannot figure out any way to get time periods to show up and I'm about to give up.

Questions:
1) Is forecasting even the right place to see a quota vs. actual sales report?
2) Is there someplace that explains forecasting? Not 'here's what the fields are' like the documentation does, but more about what forecasting does and how everything interacts to accomplish what it's designed to do.
3) In time periods, what does Fiscal Year mean/do? I don't see anyplace where 'Fiscal Year' means anything.

The user documentation is by and large useless because all it does is explain field entries on individual screens, but I've found no place that explains dependencies between modules and how quotas, forecasting, opportunities & booked sales are supposed work together. Is there anyplace that starts at the conceptual level, explains the theory and then shows how SugarCRM implements the concepts?

Thanks,
Matt

[manoj]

Hi maggiethelab,

This looks like a configuration issue largely. I will take a look at this and get someone to respond to this.
Thanks for your patience.

Manoj

[maggiethelab]

Thanks - standing by...

[RJO]

I've a similar issue: did you get a response? Regards, RJO

[rxadmin]

Same problem here, exactly.
Any resolution or config. guidelines?
Thx.
(adrian at rxnetworks dot ca)

[tbrennan]

Hi Everyone.

Adrian and I just walked through this and we had to add the fiscal year and associate the quarters to the fiscal year, then add schedules for the quarters to enable the forecasts. It is not as clear as it will be in the current wiki, but you must have one defined fiscal year with checkbox checked, and associate your other intervals to this fiscal year. Also, you will want to create the forecast schedules within each interval. Once this was done we got the intervals in the dropdown and were able to work with the worksheets.

Hope this helps,

Tom Brennan

[sdsource]

2) Is there someplace that explains forecasting? Not 'here's what the fields are' like the documentation does, but more about what forecasting does and how everything interacts to accomplish what it's designed to do.

I am badly in need of this as well. It's extremely confusing for most of my sales reps to wrap their head around it, and I usually end up confusing myself when trying to figure it out. =p