Sales Forecasting: From and To Dates, Payment Dates and In-Period Revenue

How Recordbook builds a forecast from your deals: confidence-weighted Forecast, From and To dates, payment dates and in-period revenue, with a worked example.

August 23, 2023 · By Joseph Lamoureux

Sales Forecasting: From and To Dates, Payment Dates and In-Period Revenue

A forecast answers two questions at once: how much will we win, and when will the money arrive? Most tools answer the first and blur the second, because they hang everything on the close date. Recordbook separates them. Confidence-weighted revenue tells you how much; payment dates and a From/To window tell you when. Change the window and you can look forward at a forecast or back at what actually happened, across the company, a team, a partner or one person.

How the Forecast number is built

Recordbook’s Forecast combines two things:

Closed: revenue from product and service lines marked Closed-Won, counted in full.
Qualified, weighted: revenue from lines in stages 1 to 5, each multiplied by its confidence percentage.

Unqualified deals are shown separately and don’t affect the Forecast. A pile of early-stage conversations shouldn’t make next quarter look better than it is. The pipeline guide covers each bucket in detail.

From and To: choosing the window

From is when the pipeline starts counting revenue.
To is when in-period revenue stops counting.

Each bucket then shows two figures. Total revenue is everything starting on the From date. In-period revenue is only what falls between From and To. Set the window to this quarter for “what lands this quarter,” to the fiscal year for the annual plan, or to last quarter to review what actually happened.

Payment dates decide when revenue counts

Each product or service line has a payment start date, when you started (or expect to start) receiving revenue from the customer, and a payment end date, when you stopped (or expect to stop). The From date uses payment start to begin counting revenue, and the To date uses payment end to stop counting in-period revenue.

This is the detail that makes the forecast honest. A deal you’ll sign in September but won’t bill until January doesn’t belong in September’s revenue, and in Recordbook it isn’t. The close date says when you win; the payment dates say when it counts.

A worked example

Suppose your From and To dates cover the fourth quarter, and you have three deals:

Deal A: $90,000, Closed-Won, payments starting in October.
Deal B: $200,000, Qualified at 50% confidence, payments starting in November.
Deal C: $150,000, Qualified at 80% confidence, closing in December but payments starting in February.

Deal C is the interesting one. It’s likely to close this quarter, but its payments begin after your To date, so it adds to total revenue and not to this quarter’s in-period revenue. Your in-period Forecast reflects A plus the weighted share of B. If someone asks why the quarter looks lighter than the deal list, the payment dates are the answer, and they’re on the deal for everyone to see.

Forecasting by team, partner or person

The pipeline always recalculates for the opportunities currently listed, so a forecast for any slice of the business is one filter away:

By partner: filter by the partner’s tag to see what’s forecast through each partner. That’s the number partner managers get asked for every quarter.
By person: filter by contact to see the forecast for deals a rep, or a partner’s rep, is on.
By product: filter by product or service metrics for a forecast per line of business.
By account: search the account for one customer’s outlook.

Forecasting a co-sell pipeline

Co-sell forecasts are notoriously unreliable, and not because the deals are worse. Each company forecasts the same deal from its own CRM, with its own stage and close date, and the two never agree. Recordbook connects your CRM and your partner’s to one shared workspace, so a shared deal has one stage, one close date and one set of payment dates. When the partner learns the customer’s budget moved to next year and updates the deal, your forecast moves with it.

The weighting only works if confidence means the same thing to both teams. Agree on what each level represents, in writing, before the first joint forecast review. The co-selling guide covers the other operating rules partner teams need.

Goals sit next to the forecast

Every bucket can have a goal for total revenue and for in-period revenue, so the forecast shows progress against plan, not just a number. See sales goal tracking.

A forecast checklist

Every open line has a stage, confidence, close date and payment start date.
Confidence levels have written definitions everyone uses.
Close dates in the past are updated before the review, not during it.
From and To match the period you’re reporting on.
Recurring revenue has payment end dates, so in-period revenue isn’t overstated.

Try it on your own pipeline

Recordbook is free to start. Every feature is on every plan, and adding your team or your partners costs nothing extra. Create your free workspace.