Forecasting expected income

Getting a clear picture of when you’re going to receive income is very important and helpful at the best of times, but during this unprecedented period of uncertainty your businesses ability to forecast its income is essential.

No forecasting model is going to be iron clad, but the ability for you to look ahead will allow you to remove some of the guesswork from this situation and help you to make some informed decisions.

Expected income from accepted quotes

We’d previously written a guide on using quotes for income forecasting, and that continues to be relevant and helpful. Read more

In situations where shoots have been postponed and you have agreed that balances will now be paid at a later date, then updating the Balance Due Date field of the quote will help your forecast to remain accurate and helpful.

Invoices awaiting payment

As well as accepted quotes that you haven’t yet created invoices for, you may also have outstanding sales which have been invoiced but are yet to be paid.

As with your quotes, you should also update the payment due date for your sales.

Light Blue has an existing query that shows all of your sales that are awaiting payment.

By viewing those sales in the List View, and customising that view to show the payment due date and grouping them by payment due month, you will be able to build a picture of the income that you can expect in the next few months.

If you save the list view as a custom report then you can quickly run the numbers again (with the most up to date information) with a couple of clicks whenever you need – just click on the Reports menu, then Custom Reports.

Adjusting to changes

Things will be in a state of flux as you may be in a period of negotiation with your clients, but as you update sale and quote records payment due / balance due fields based on changes then you’ll be able to get a picture of what should be coming in and when.

This article has focussed on dealing with quotes and invoices that are still relevant. There will be circumstances where you no longer intend to peruse the balance of an outstanding invoice, in which case you can issue a credit note. If you have received some money from a client that you have agreed to return, then you can issue a refund.

We’re here to help if you have any specific questions around managing your finances within Light Blue, and we’ll gladly chat via a free 1:1 call.