Live Forecast Follow

In this article: 

• Turning Live Forecast on
• How Live Forecast updates your financial statement
• Cash Bar on your Profit and Loss

LivePlan now allows LivePlan Premium users to review actuals for completed months in your forecast. This way, you can compare prior months' forecasted values against actuals and understand how your past performance impacts your projected numbers. 

This feature is available to LivePlan Premium users. To learn more about LivePlan Premium, please click here. 

Turning Live Forecast on

To turn this feature on, navigate to the Forecast tab, then to your Profit and Loss statement. Here you’ll see a Live Forecast toggle at the top right of the statement:

Clicking this toggle will turn the Live Forecast feature on. You can click the button again to turn it off. 

How Live Forecast updates your financial statement

When Live Forecast is on, columns for past periods will display actual accounting data. This data will come from the Dashboard, and does require you to have either manually added accounting data, or to be connected to an accounting solution. 

Note: Only Salaries & Wage totals are compared in Live Forecast. Individual salaries are not displayed in the Live Forecast view.

Each column will now be marked with a < > icon, allowing you to expand the column to display additional information.

Once expanded you’ll be able to compare your actuals against your originally forecasted value, and the percentage difference between the two. The percentage change figure will be marked with an arrow, noting an increase or decrease in value. It’s also color coded to denote if this is a positive or negative change. 

Any charts at the top of the financial statement will also be updated. Past periods will now be displayed in light blue/purple, while future periods will be displayed in dark blue/purple. 

Note: LivePlan will not overwrite your forecasted data in any way. The Live Forecast feature will simply overlay actual data on your Profit and Loss and can be toggled off at anytime.

For future periods (for example, a forecasted month in the future), LivePlan will continue to display the forecasted data for that period. For ongoing periods (for example, your current year in progress) LivePlan will display a combination of actuals to date plus the ongoing forecasted values.  

Cash Bar

When the Live Forecast feature is enabled the Profit and Loss statement will now display your ongoing cash balance. This makes it easier to reference your cash balance, without needing to toggle to a different statement.

Your cash balance will be updated to display your actual balance for past periods. In addition, LivePlan will use this cash balance to calculate future periods, adding your future net change in cash to your current cash balance. You can see your net change in cash for future periods by using your Cash Flow statement.

The cash bar gives you an easy way to understand how your forecasted values will impact your current cash. 

Toggling Live Forecast off will result in your cash balance using only your forecast data. 

Note: The cash balance will not be displayed when you print your Profit and Loss statement.