Excel: Sales Forecasting

Learn how to use Excel to forecast sales more effectively. Instructor Michael McDonald offers a primer on sales forecasting, regression analysis, data set construction, and more.

Introduction

• Using Excel for sales forecasting

1. The Basics

• What is sales forecasting?
• Business intelligence and company sales

2. What Goes into a Forecast?

• Conventional forecasting methods
• Basics of business regression analysis
• Predict values with regression analysis
• Budgeting and forecasting using growth rates

3. Getting Data for a Forecast

• Gather sales data
• Using data from FRED
• Clean sales data
• Identifying outliers
• What do the results mean?
• Confidence intervals around the result
• Stress testing the results

4. Putting It All Together

• Customer transaction forecasting
• Running forecasts with non-numerical data
• Interpreting your forecast

Conclusion

• Running your own analysis