Forecasting

• Reviewing your last quarter's numbers

As a manager or partner, you may need to provide short-term forecasts for your engagements or for your organization. When forecasting, you may consider both quantitative and qualitative analysis. For quantitative analysis, you will likely need to review historical data, and some of that data can be pulled directly from Cloud.

If your organization uses the Time app to submit time and expense entries, you can generate reports that give records of some of the costs of your engagement work. You generate these reports on the Analysis app.

Reviewing your last quarter’s numbers

You can generate summary reports in the Analysis app to give you high-level information about your costs and the time spent by your staff on engagement work.

For example, suppose that you wanted to generate a summary of all the time spent on each of your engagements during the last quarter, and the costs for that work.

To do this, create a summary report. On the Analysis app, you should set your Format to Summary, your Group by to Entity, and set the date range using the first and last days of your previous quarter.

To generate a summary Time report:

1. Ensure that you have the View all staff entries permission.

2. From the Cloud menu, select Analysis.

3. From the Type drop-down menu, choose Time.

4. From the Format drop-down menu, choose Summary.

5. Set the other parameters for your report.

6. Select Generate.

   

You have generated a report that summarizes the billable and non-billable work done by your staff for each of your clients. To export a copy of the report in CSV format, select the Export button in the left-hand pane.

You can generate a report for the same period that summarizes your expenses per client. From the Type drop-down menu, choose Expense, then select Generate.

You can also narrow the scope of your summary reports. In the Select section, you can filter your reports to only include entries that meet specific criteria.

If you need to review the details of your last quarter’s numbers, you can generate a detail report in the Analysis app.

For example, suppose that you run a summary report for the time spent on each of your engagements in the previous quarter, and you notice that there are many non-billable hours for one of your clients.

To investigate this, you decide to run a detail report to show you the non-billable time entries for each staff member who worked on this client’s engagement. You use the following report parameters:

• Type: Time

• Format: Detail

• Group by: Staff

• Entity: Superior Furniture

• Bill type: Non-billable

• From date: First day of the previous quarter

• To date: Last day of the previous quarter

To generate a detail time report:

1. Ensure that you have the View all staff entries permission.

2. From the Cloud menu, select Analysis.

3. From the Type drop-down menu, choose Time.

4. From the Format drop-down menu, choose Detailed.

5. Set the other parameters for your report.

6. Select Generate.

   

You have generated a report that displays all of the non-billable time entries for your client in the first quarter.

You can contact the staff member for more information about these entries, and based on that discussion you can determine whether you should expect to have more non-billable entries for this client in the future.