Suppose you are watching a Formula One race, and some of the best automobile brands are trying to win it. What if you were already aware that McLaren would win and Ferrari would be the runners-up? You can easily place your bet and then sit back and relax at a beach. It is a highly specialised skill to speculate on future developments in a business by analysing past data.
Did you know?
Henry Fayol, a French Engineer, was the first person who emphasised the need to predict the future on a systematic basis.
Meaning of Business Forecast
Business Forecasting refers to the tools and techniques for analysing the trends of past business data and insight-driven business development decisions for the future. It helps the business determine resource allocation and plan systematically for upcoming activities and projects. Usually, there are risks involved in relying on past data. But you will still have all the required information to get a step closer to the final forecast, even if your estimates turn out inaccurate.
Business Forecasting can help businesses to make intelligent business decisions. It can positively impact their overall performance and growth. For example, if a manufacturer can predict that demand will spike for one of their products during February, they can meet the demand by ensuring sufficient production. It will enhance their growth and profitability.
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Why is Business Forecasting Important?
Forecasting does not promise a clear picture of how your business will evolve in the future. But, any insight into the future will put your business at an advantage. In other words, the organisation can at least see itself in a direction backed by logic, information, and experimental reasoning. Today forecasting a business is easy with artificial intelligence and forecasting software. Through this technique, businesses can understand the weaknesses in their planning and achieve effective and efficient control over business operations. Business forecasting is crucial in making nearly every business decision. The importance of business forecasting is:
- The management of an e-Commerce business can estimate the rising demand for holiday shopping and ensure ample production of the best-selling products well in advance.
- Stock marketers can use business forecasting to make educated guesswork about the rising prices of the shares shortly.
- The production department of a shoe manufacturing business can estimate the designs that will be up for demand in the New Year and stock those designs beforehand.
- The business forecasting of the industrial and services sectors helps economists find out about the changes in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a nation.
- Business Forecasting leads to success in the organisation by identifying and overcoming the uncertainty of future events.
Types of Business Forecasting
We can conduct Business Forecasting under two methods:
- Quantitative Modelling Methods
- Qualitative Modelling Methods
Quantitative Modelling Methods:
A quantitative model is a long-term business forecasting method working with numbers, data, and formulas. They deal with measurable data like statistics and historical data. The quantitative approach removes human interference and solely deals with data, determining the variables to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between events and their results. The past sales number is an example of data that we use in the quantitative approach.
Approaches of Quantitative Approaches in Business Forecasting are:
- The Indicator Approach: This approach is a widely used business forecasting technique. It relies on the relationship between specific indicators to track leading indicators for estimating the future. It involves continuous monitoring of the KPIs of a business to form an opinion.
- The Time Series Analysis: This is the most common business forecasting technique known as the Trend Analysis Method. In this approach, the business uses past data as a benchmark to estimate future events. This method focuses on recent data.
- The Econometric Modelling: This is a mathematical version of the indicator approach that uses multiple-regression equations to test the data sets, their consistency, and their relationship. Hence, in the Econometric approach, we have mathematics and statistics as the foundation for speculating the future.
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Qualitative Modelling Methods:
Qualitative models help predict the short-term success of the business by relying on historical data, industry experts, and customers’ opinions. Qualitative forecasts rely on the market as a whole to make informed decisions. Hence, this method is an expert-driven approach. They bring up a dependency on judgment over measurable data. It is the best approach to reach a quantitative forecast when there is insufficient historical data to make relevant conclusions. Qualitative models include:
- Market Research Model: It involves in-depth and elaborate market research. It includes conducting large-scale polls with prospective customers and employees to get their opinions and feedback. Through this technique, a business can analyse the mood of its target customers and make business decisions accordingly. In short, the outcome of a new launch becomes easy to predict.
- Delphi Model: This technique involves establishing a panel of experts and seeking their views on a specific issue. The businesses then analyse these predictions and share an unbiased opinion accordingly.
A business uses quantitative and qualitative forecasting techniques at different stages of a product’s life cycle. These techniques provide sets of data for conclusions.
Components of a Business Forecasting System
A business organisation uses forecasts to develop plans. The very act of business forecasting may help in thinking ahead and making provisions for the future. Hence, it plays a crucial role in projections and future planning. James W. Redfield has summarised the following elements of the forecasting process:
- Preparation of the Groundwork: It involves carrying out an orderly investigation and analysis of the company, its products, and the industry. The investigation analyses the performance of all these factors in the past and their growth in the future.
- Establishment of the future business- This includes calculating the future expectancies of the business organisation from historical data and input. The key executives of the organisation provide these inputs. Hence, the forecast involves the participation of key personnel. These people are accountable for meeting the forecasts.
- Comparing the actual and estimated result- Business forecasting over a while sets a benchmark against the actual outcomes and growth. Hence, comparing them helps to investigate and analyse the reasons for deviation in case of significant variations between the two.
- Refining the Forecast process- The management can refine the forecast to be more realistic once it gains command over predicting the future of the business. It can incorporate new variables in the estimates if conditions change during the evaluation.
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Business Forecasting Examples
Let’s look into a few examples to understand this better. The business forecasting examples include:
- Budgeting efficient allocation of resources and provisions.
- Analysing relationships between values of variables, e.g., Google ads and potential revenue.
- Estimating future sales growth using past sales performance.
- Predicting the entry of new competitors in your market.
- Identifying and understanding the opportunity of new developing products or services.
- Estimating the financial needs of the business within a time frame. It involves computing cash flow forecasts.
- Predicting the expenses of recurring bills.
Benefits of Business Forecasting System
- It is valuable as it gives the ability to make informed business decisions and develop data-driven strategies.
- Financial and operational decisions are taken on the basis of current market conditions and predictions on how the future looks.
- Forecasting allows your company to be proactive instead of reactive.
Limitations of Business Forecasting
We should understand that a business forecast is only a mere prediction of the future. It cannot indicate the actual position of the business owing to the lack of certainty. Even the best business plans may fail and result in losses because of uncertainty. People also feel that the negative or positive attitude of the forecaster influences the forecasting process. Hence, business forecasting has the following limitations:
- The Dependency on Past Data- Since the management makes a forecasting based on past events and data, people question the accuracy and usefulness of those past recorded events.
- The Basis of Business Forecasting- The most serious disadvantage of business forecasting is the basis the management team uses for making it. Assumptions and approximations are the bases for forecasting the future of the organisation. It may fail to question the logic of the projection getting busy with its mechanism.
- The Integrity of the Forecasting Techniques- The forecasting methods are not fully developed yet. Also, it is more of an art than science. Hence, one cannot call the forecasting techniques a full-proof method of estimating the future.
- The Time and Cost Factor- Time & cost play a crucial role in business projection by suggesting the extent to which an organisation will go for formal business forecasting. Some information that the business needs for the forecast process is not organised. Some may be in qualitative form. Converting Qualitative data into quantitative ones takes a lot of money and time. Hence, a cost-benefit analysis is crucial.
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Conclusion:
So, are you ready to make predictions for your business organisation and improve your forecasting process? Well, we believe it all depends on applying the forecasting techniques. The forecaster needs to blend them with the knowledge of the management team. That is all that makes a business forecasting process work. In this blog, we gained a detailed insight into the meaning of business forecasting, its methods, components, importance, and limits.
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