Help with forecasting

[peter.brown]

Hi,

We just started using Sugar at 4.5 and I'm trying to get my head around forecasting.

1) I think I understand the conept of time periods but I don't understand how the financial year is used, and why other periods need to belong to it. The FY is not selectable in any screen I've found (other than the one for creating periods). Is there a report somewhere?

2) What are schedules all about? The admin guide for 4.5 talks about "runnung" the forecast. What does that mean? It also talks about the users "recieving" the report. What's that about? do direct reports get an email? if so how is this set up, how often are the reports sent?

3) I can't see past periods. If I go nto the quota worksheet I can only select the current quarter even though I have last quarter and the next 2 quarters set up. Likewise with the forecast history, only the current quarter.

4) There was talk about reporting forecast against actuals againt quota, I guess it hasn't been implemented yet huh?

Peter.

[james@maxum.co.nz]

We're also struggling to generate forecasting output

So far we have set up a fiscal year starting 01-July-2006, finishing 30-June-2007. Wihtin this fiscal year we have set up four quarters:

Q1 = 01 July 2006 finishing 30 September 2006
Q2 = 01 October 2006 finishing 31 December 2006
Q3 = 01 January 2007 finishing 31 March 2007
Q4 = 01 April 2007 finishing 30 June 2007

We have set up forecast schedules for users within these periods, all start dates for the schedules are 01 July 2006. The assumption is that each quarter starts on 01 July and finishes on it's assigned finish date, therefore Q4 would encompass the entire fiscal year. Also forecast schedules have been setup for the fiscal year for each user. We have assigned quotas for each user within these forecast schedules. The users have logged in and setup opportunities with expected closing dates meeting timeframes within the forecast schedules and then commited these in the forecast worksheet. The manager of these users then logs in and selects a time period from the forecast worksheet, selects either a user or his team and clicks "view chart". Here's the problem: the chart only displays current and historical quarters. This is not much use for forecasting. Can you please advise if we are doing anything wrong, if so what, or if this is a limitaion of the SugarCRM software.

We have implmented a temporary workaround by editing the following:
Line 68 in /modules/Forecasts/charts.php

From this:
$query.=" where start_date <= '$timeperiod_date'";

To this:
$query.=" where 1 ";

The result is that all quarters are output to the chart.

[mbarlow310]

Is this still how it works? 6 months and no answers? Can someone update this?