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Sage has developed an advanced forecasting solution called Sage Financial Forecasting, to enable businesses to produce accurate financial forecasts. Whether producing detailed, or high level forecasts, this software is quick and easy to use.
Developed in conjunction with small and medium-sized businesses and accountants Sage Financial Forecasting is easy to use and comes complete with a variety of time-saving features enabling more sophisticated and accurate forecasts to be produced at even greater speed than ever before.
"Effective managers don't just react to events; they anticipate and plan for the unexpected. Successful organisations open their minds to various scenarios and appreciate the dynamic factors that affect each outcome. In academia we are seeing a rush to create ever-sophisticated forecasting methods reflecting the complex and volatile nature of today's business. Software that eases forecasting and is flexible will be an invaluable asset to business performance and indeed survival".
Professor Phil Holmes, Professor of Finance, Durham Business School.
 Sage Instant Forecasting
Forecasting and cash flow made easy
Its a fact that many smaller businesses fail due to poor financial forecasting and lack of cash rather than poor sales, so a well structured and thought out forecast is vital to the continuing success of a company, helping to prepare for the inevitable cashflow peaks and troughs.
Sage Instant Forecasting is an easy-to-use forecasting solution to help you gain greater control over your cashflow and business. It has been designed specifically to help small businesses to plan more efficiently for the future and can be used stand-alone or when linked with Sage Instant Accounts.
Regular forecasting enables you to:
- Manage your business’s cash flow
- Identify trends and potential bottlenecks
- Improve business budgeting accuracy
- Locate opportunities to increase profit
- Highlight potential barriers to growth and profitability
Sage Instant Forecasting will save you valuable time in preparing professional financial reports such as Cash Flow, Profit & Loss, and Balance Sheet. Reports are then automatically updated when information is changed within the forecast.
Improve forecasting detail and accuracy in areas such as sales, costs, overheads, wages, fixed assets and more – a simple and effective alternative to complex spreadsheet forecasting.
Explore growth opportunities and potential risks with ‘What if?’ scenarios, giving you the confidence to make important business decisions.
With Instant Forecasting you can effectively budget, understand your business, identify unnecessary costs and predict possible shortfalls in your cash flow with ease.
Create Forecasts Quickly |
The intuitive user interface makes creating and maintaining forecasts quick and easy |
Multi-Year Forecasts |
Forecast your business projections for up to 5 years |
Simple and Flexible Data Entry |
Quick and easy data entry eliminates the complications and errors often associated with spreadsheet forecasting. For ease of use, enter data on a monthly or annual basis |
Pre-formatted Financial Reports |
Complete a set of financial reports at a click of a button, including Cash Flow, Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet |
Drill Down |
Double click to analyse and edit forecast values in more detail |
Real Time Financial Forecasting |
See the impact of your entries on such things as net profit and your bank balance immediately. No need to run reports to see the numbers that you're most interested in |
Automatic VAT and Loan Calculations |
See the effect of VAT, loans and HP agreements on your business cash flow |
What if? Scenarios |
Explore growth opportunities and potential risks with ‘What if?’ scenarios. For example, what would be the impact on your business if your sales were to increase by 10% or you needed to employ another member of staff? |
Forecasts Wage Costs |
Wage costs are a major business expense. Accurately forecast wage costs at a summary level |
Integrates with Instant Accounts |
Sage Instant Forecasting can link directly to Sage Instant Accounts. As the data in Instant Accounts changes your forecast is automatically updated |
Why not just use Excel to Forecast?
Instant Forecasting is an easy to use and effective alternative to complex spreadsheet forecasting
Sage Instant Forecasting has been designed to eliminate the time-consuming and uncertain task of producing spreadsheets to create financial models and reports. Its ease of use, pre-installed formulae, and integration with Instant Accounts combine to produce figures that you can trust. Then, when business assumptions change, new products launch, or start dates change, all you do is enter the data and Sage Instant Forecasting adjusts forecasts accordingly, recalculating all your reports instantly.
Sage Instant Forecasting - Features and Benefits
- An accurate monthly cashflow forecast will allow you to get a clear idea of how your business is doing – and how it is likely to perform in the future
- You will be able to specify times when your business may need additional funding, such as when cash outflow exceeds inflow
- Inconsistencies in performance can be identified, predicted and remedied
- Major new investments can be bedded in and accurately assessed
Feature |
Sage Instant Forecasting |
Integration
Integrates with Instant Accounts. |
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Data Entry
Quick and easy data entry, helping to minimise the complications and errors often associated with spreadsheet forecasting. |
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Enter data at monthly or annually levels
Enter data for any period and at all levels. |
Monthly/annually
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Explore data
Double clicking on any figure in any report and you can analyse it in more detail, double click again to update your data on its data entry screen. |
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Integrated professional reports
Prepare comprehensive Cash Flow, Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet. Year-on-Year and reports much quicker than with a standard spreadsheet. |
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Report formatting
View reports in different timescales, prioritise your own factors such as gross profit and percentage. |
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Automatic calculations
VAT and Bank interest is calculated automatically. |
Limited VAT Schemes
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Forecast your wage costs on a summary basis, showing Employer and Employee deductions
Wage costs can be a major business expense. Accurately forecast your wage costs, calculating total deductions to give summary PAYE/NI payments and Net Wage Payments automatically. |
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Forecast the effect of taking out loans and HP agreements
Loans and HP agreements are important nways of funding expansion and asset purchases. Make sure you understand the impact of the repayments on your business. |
Manual Entry Type Only
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Project your stock purchases, usage and levels
Stock purchases can consume working capital. Make sure that you manage your stock levels to maximise your available cash |
No BOM
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New look & feel user interface
The intuitive new look and feel makes creating and navigating forcasts much quicker and easier, which helps to minimise the complications and errors often associated with spreadsheet forecasting. |
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Value Pane: Immediately assess the impact on your key values
View changes instantly to the bottom line using the key forecast values, such as gross profit within a value pane rather than generating separate reports for comparison purposes. |
Limited options
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Create multi-year forecasts
Covers as many years as you require for your business forecasts (5 years max). |
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Unlimited Forecasts
Produce multiple forecasts |
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Create and explore 'what if?' scenarios
Create a range of 'what if?' scenarios to help analyse your business sensitivity. |
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SageCover*
Extended service and support package. |
Optional* |
Warranty/technical support |
45 days |
Sage Financial Forecasting
Accurate forecasting is the key to business growth and success. It not only helps you plan for the future, it also gives you a powerful tool for managing the present.
Sage Financial Forecasting has been designed to eliminate the time-consuming and uncertain task of producing spreadsheets to create financial models.
By constantly updating your forecasts with current data, Sage Financial Forecasting allows you to easily re-forecast, using actual results while still leaving your original budgets intact.
Sage Financial Forecasting - Features and Benefits
 Developed in conjunction with small and medium-sized businesses and accountants, Sage Financial Forecasting offers easy-to-use features that let you produce sophisticated and accurate forecasts.
Features & Benefits
Feature |
Description |
Quick and reliable forecast creation |
Our intuitive look and feel makes creating and navigating forecasts much quicker and easier, minimising the complications and errors often associated with spreadsheet forecasting. |
Create multi-year forecasts |
Covers as many years as you require for your business forecasts
(50 years max.). |
12 or 13-period forecasts |
Choose from 12 or 13 periods to suit your business accounting periods. |
Enter data at weekly, monthly or annual levels |
Enter data for any period and view at all levels. |
Create "What if?" scenarios |
Create a range of "What if?" scenarios to help analyse your business sensitivity to change. |
Professional reports |
Prepare comprehensive Profit & Loss, Funds Flow, Balance Sheet, Year-on-Year and Cash Flow reports with greater accuracy. |
Improve the accuracy of your forecasts |
Compare your actual performance with your budgets and re-forecast accordingly. You will find it easy to produce variance reports and to re-forecast based on actual data. |
Automatic calculations |
VAT, PAYE, NI, Corporation Tax and Bank Interest are all calculated automatically. |
Immediately assess the impact on your key values |
See the immediate impact on your most important values (e.g. Net Profit) as you enter data. |
Create unlimited departments |
A department can have sub-departments and as many sales and cost sections as you require. |
Project your stock purchases, usage and levels, including Bills of Materials |
Ensure that you manage your stock levels to maximise available cash. |
Prior Profit & Loss |
When starting to forecast part-way through an accounting period, the Prior P&L feature allows you to enter a single cumulative value against each profit and loss record for the already-lapsed periods, thus saving you time and effort. |
Forecast the effect of taking out loans |
Loans and HP agreements are important ways of funding expansion - make sure you understand the impact of repayments. |
Forecast your wage costs on a summary or per-employee basis |
Accurately forecast wage costs including NI and Pension contributions. |
Easily create provisions for bad debts and obsolete stock |
Ensure that your forecasts take account of customers failing to pay you and stock becoming unusable. |
Model the impact of factoring and stock financing |
Easily work out the impact that these schemes could have on your business. |
Integrates with Sage products and with Microsoft Excel |
Forecast data can be linked to sources including Sage Line 50, Sage Line 100, Sage MMS (up to 2.3) and Sage Payroll, plus Microsoft Excel. Change the data in the link and your forecast is automatically updated. |
Multi-currency forecasting |
Data can be entered in foreign currencies, allowing rapid adjustment if exchange rates change, and data is converted to one currency in the report set. |
Cash receipts and payments |
Input figures based on cash receipts and payments and the software will work out all the VAT calculations for net sales. |
Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation
Product Overview
Accurate business forecasting is vital to the continuing success of your company and can help you prepare for the inevitable cash flow peaks and troughs that you will face. Forecasting helps you stay in control of your finances, gives you peace of mind, and allows you to focus on growing and developing your business.
However many companies simply don’t do any forecasting at all, often because they feel that they don’t have the time, the expertise or the right software for the job. Alternatively many businesses use spreadsheets to create their forecasts, but these are error prone – with up to 85% containing errors.
Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation enables you to create accurate financial forecasts for your business that are either as detailed or as high level as you need. Creating forecasts is easy and quick; Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation handles all double entry and performs the all complicated calculations such as those involved in factoring and provisions. Reports such as profit and loss, and cash flow are supplied, and can be viewed at any time. It also enables you to investigate any number of “What if?” scenarios to better plan for the future.
Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation allows you to consolidate individual forecasts from multiple companies, divisions or departments. You can even consolidate consolidations!
Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation’s adaptability allows you to use it as standalone software, or link it to existing spreadsheets or your Sage Line 50 / Sage Line 100 accounting data so that you can take your financial forecasting one step further.
The product has been developed for both accountants in practice and businesses wishing to control their budgeting and planning process.
Sage WinForecast Professional Consolidation - Features and Benefits
Features |
Quick and easy data entry, including integration with spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel as well as with Sage Line 50, Sage Line 100 and Sage Line 200 |
Enter sales and costs in their own currency and apply standard exchange rates |
Complex calculations such as VAT and Corporation Tax are automatically calculated |
Develop any report with simple or complex formulas to highlight key information or financial ratios, additionally, formulae for many commonly used ratios are already included |
Double click on any figure in any report and you can analyse it in more detail, double click again to update your data on its data entry screen |
Re-forecast based on actual results, enabling you to analyse your budgets and financial plans at any time - ultimately giving you the flexibility to advise senior management and influence business decisions |
Integrated multi-year reports set ensures that Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow and other reports can be automatically updated. Employee, Fixed Asset, VAT and Loan Schedules give instant and easy access to key business information. |
View reports in different timescales, prioritise your own factors such as gross profit, percentage, and rename headings to fit your business. Finally, all report formats that you create can be saved |
Using variance reports, easily measure your actual performance against your projections |
Undertake “What if?” analysis of your forecasts to understand the impact of foreseeable changes. |
Create individual and combined forecasts for all of your companies or departments, and you can consolidate consolidations! |
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