New forecasts will, by default, include all the user’s deals that have a close date before the end of the current period. Advanced forecasts will automatically reflect all the existing Weights and Status' from the deal level.

Any deals can then be added or removed from this list.

Status
The user can assign each deal status based on the confidence of closure in the current period, these can have their own internal definition within your company, however the way many customers use status’ are:

These status' are also projected onto the funnel visual when the Forecast option is chosen from the colour key dropdown. The (unweighted) total for each status is also displayed on the dashboard forecast widgets.

Weight
Forecast weighting is independent of status. A weighted forecast is useful for organizations with many deals of similar value as it helps to average out single deal outliers to create a general picture of predicted revenue. The total weighted value is displayed at the bottom right of the forecast. Weighting should not be relied upon with small numbers of deals and/or with deals of highly variable size.

Publishing a forecast
The systemallows users to create their own private forecasts in order to model their performance without prematurely setting expectations. Once a user is confident in their calculations, they can ‘publish’ a particular forecast to make it available to their manager. Once this has been done the manager can then see their forecast and combine it with other team members’ forecasts to roll-up and again model and publish as required upstream to senior management.

The most recently published forecast will be reflected on the funnel visualization, but will not update the underlying deal details.

For more details on the practical implementation of effective forecasting, please review our blog articles: http://blog.salesseek.net/sales-droop/