Configuring Salesforce Collaborative Forecast

What is Forecast?

• Revenue projection or aggregates of individual opportunities
• Can be expressed in dollar amounts, unit of products, or both
• Individual forecast roll up into the forecast for entire sales organization

Background: Universal Container would like to implement Forecast based on opportunity Amount, Expected Revenue, Margin and Expected Margin. Margin and Expected Margin is custom currency field in opportunity.

Solution: to implement Collaboration Forecast, the old Customizable Forecast (before Winter '12 release) do not support to forecast by custom field. For complete different between Customizable Forecasts with Collaborative Forecasts, see reference below.

1. Key Fields
There are five fields of opportunity are important for the forecast:

• Amount - when you select Opportunity Revenue as Forecast Type, this value rolls up into forecast aggregates
• Expected Revenue - this value calculate Probability multiply by Amount, you can use this value as a Forecast Type 
• Forecast Category - populated by default by sales stage, admin can hide this field from opportunity page layout to disable user possibility to change forecast category. This aggregate summary of amount into forecast
• Probability - represent the likelihood of the opportunity will be close, by default admin set the probability for each stage, but user able to overwrite it
• Stage - identify where an opportunity in the sales pipeline

2. Setup Opportunity Split
Even Universal Container does not have requirements for Opportunity Split, but to enable custom currency field for you need to enable Opportunity Split.

Note: the custom field needs to be currency field, not a number and not even formula with return currency.

Opportunity Split lets team members share sales credit for an opportunity. Multiple team members working on an opportunity can roll their individual sales credits into quota and pipeline reports for the entire team.

To setup Opportunity Split, navigate to Setup | Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Splits | Settings.

If you do not see Opportunity Splits menu, you need to enable Opportunity Teams, navigate to Setup | Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Team Settings

Click Set up Opportunity Splits button. By default, it will activate Revenue and Overlay. For our case, since we do not need Overlay, just disable it. Click + Add a new split type to add Expected Revenue, Margin and Expected Margin, tick all for 100%. Click Save button and make sure all Split type is Active

3. Enable Forecast
Navigate to Setup | Customize | Forecasts | Settings - click Enable Forecasts

Click Add a Forecast Type link, for Amount, select Opportunities, click OK to continue then click link + Add another forecast type
- Expected Revenue, select Expected Revenue from dropdown value
- Margin, select Margin from dropdown value
- Expected Margin, select Expected Margin from dropdown value
If you do not see any of them, make sure they are added in Opportunity Split. Click Save button to save.

4. Forecasts Tab
If users get an error message or Introducing Forecasts page when clicking this tab, make sure Allow Forecasting is enabled for the user in the user detail.
If users do not see Forecast tab, even after click + tab at the right, check user profile and make sure Forecast in Standard Tab Settings is not Tab Hidden.

When you click forecast tab, it will show forecast based on your forecast setting in "Configure the default forecast display". Column show here is based on Forecast Category values defined, except Omitted.

When you click forecast for a month, it will show all opportunities with Close Date for the month at the bottom panel. Each forecast type may have the different column of the opportunity information. To modify column shown in this table, go to Forecast Setting and click the Forecast Type. See the last screenshot above.

Notice that you can change forecast type in the forecast page use dropdown value, when you select a new type, all values in the forecast and opportunity table layout will be updated as Forecast Type selected.

In Customizable Forecasts, the forecast categories reflect aggregate information; for example, Pipeline contains amounts for all open opportunities (excluding omitted), see this blog for the detail.

In Collaborative Forecasts, the forecast categories display information for that specific category; for example, Best Case only reflects amounts in the Best Case category, or to Enable Cumulative Forecast Rollups.

Reference:

• What's the difference between the Forecasting features?
• Enable Opportunity Splits and Split Types
• Forecasts Administrator's Workbook