Live Forecast is designed to help users review forecast performance with their financial actuals for previous months, revise their forecast moving forward, and react quickly to unexpected results.
In this article:
- Turning Live Forecast on
- How Live Forecast updates your financial statement
- Cash Bar on your Profit and Loss
LivePlan Premium users can review actuals for completed months in their forecast. This way, they can compare prior months' forecasted values against actuals and understand how your past performance impacts the projected numbers.
To utilize Live Forecast, you will first need to have financial actuals entered in your Dashboard. These can come directly from your accounting data or be entered directly.
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 window:
Clicking this toggle will turn the Live Forecast feature on. You can click the button again to turn it off.
Note: Live Forecast will be visible to contributors with the permission "See actual financial results". To change contributor permissions, refer to "Changing contributor permissions" in your account settings.
How Live Forecast updates your financial statement
When Live Forecast is on, past-period columns will display actual accounting data. This data will come from the Dashboard and requires you to either directly add accounting data or 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 can 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 be displayed in light blue/purple, while future periods will be shown in dark blue/purple.
Note: LivePlan will not overwrite your forecasted data in any way. The Live Forecast feature will overlay actual data on your Profit and Loss and can be toggled off at any time.
For future periods (for example, a forecasted month), 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
The Profit and Loss statement will display your ongoing cash balance when enabled by the Live Forecast feature. This makes it easier to reference your cash balance without switching 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. Using your Cash Flow statement, you can see your net change in cash for future periods.
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.