How to create forecasts in QuickBooks Online Advanced

[0:00] In QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can create forecasts to help you project your growth, spot trends, and create budgets. We'll go over how to set up a forecast and then adjust it. Select Reports, then Financial planning, then Forecasts. Then select Create forecast. QuickBooks uses information from your Profit and Loss statement to build forecasts for your income, cost of sales, and expenses.

[0:27] You can make a forecast for the rest of the fiscal year, up to the end of next year, or up to three years. Next, select how you want QuickBooks to build your forecast. If you select Average of actuals, QuickBooks looks at the actuals you select here, calculates the average for that period, and then uses it to forecast your growth.

[0:49] This is the best choice if your revenue and expenses stay roughly the same each month and you have low seasonality. If you select Actuals from last FY, note that the Use actuals from field disappears. That's because QuickBooks uses your actual monthly figures from last year to build a forecast. This is the best choice if your revenue and expenses vary by season or month.

[1:11] Let's build this forecast from an average of actuals from last year. If you want to project an increase or decrease in your performance, enter it here. Let's project an increase of ten percent for all accounts. Select Next. You can change any of your settings from here. Let's keep what we filled out earlier. Close the window. Here's the monthly projection, QuickBooks built from your choices.

[1:37] There are a few ways you can adjust your forecast. You can change the name. You can select a field to manually adjust a forecast for an account in a specific month. And you can select this to change the settings you used when you originally built your forecast. You can also turn the forecast into a budget. Then you'll be able to run budget versus actuals reports against it.

[2:01] When you're done, select Save and close. From here, you can create more forecasts, edit the forecast you just created, or delete it. Now you're ready to create a forecast to project the growth of your business.