If you are a business with a few years of operations, your revenue forecasting process will involve examining previous years' revenues and making adjustments for the upcoming year. If you are a new startup with no business experience, you will need to estimate your total sales, price per product, and do market research to see what a business of your size can expect to earn.  Remember that revenue forecasts are rarely accurate. The point is to provide the best possible estimate using the knowledge you have.  Always be conservative. This means assume you will receive sales volumes and pricing on the low end of the possible range. This is especially important for new businesses. Examine businesses in your region that provide similar goods or services. Take note of the prices of their products or services.  For example, assume you are opening a therapy practice. Therapists in your region may charge $100 to $200 per hour. Compare your qualifications, experience, and service offerings to your competition, and estimate your price. You may decide $100 is wise. If you offer multiple products and services, make sure to research prices for those too. Sales volumes are how much of your product you sell. Your revenues are equal to your price per good/service multiplied by the number of goods or services you provide. You will therefore need to estimate how much of your good/service you will sell over the course of the year.  Do you have any customers or contracts lined up? If so, include these. You can then assume referrals from customers and advertising will add to these volumes over the year. Compare to existing businesses. If you have colleagues who have established businesses, ask them what their volumes were like early on. For a therapy practice, your colleagues may tell you during their first year they averaged about 10 client hours a week. Look at what drives sales volumes. If you are opening a therapy practice, for example, your reputation, referrals, and advertising will bring in people. You could decide that based on these resources, one new client every two weeks is reasonable. You could then go further and make an estimate that each client will pay for one hour a week, and last for an average of six months. Once again, remember that revenue forecasts are purely estimates. This is essential if you are a well established business. One effective strategy for forecasting is to take the previous year's revenue, and then examine what changes will occur over the next year.  Look at pricing. Do you have reason to believe your prices will increase or decrease? Look at volume. Are more people going to be purchasing your product or service? If your business has been growing by 2% annually, you can assume the same for the following year if no significant changes have occurred. If you plan on aggressively advertising, you could bump that up to 3%. Look at the market. Is your market growing? For example, imagine that you run a coffee shop in a downtown neighborhood. You may be aware that the neighborhood is rapidly growing due to new people moving in. This could be reason to add to your growth forecast.
فكر في وضعك الحالي. قم بأبحاث سوق لتحديد السعر. قدر حجم مبيعاتك. استخدم البيانات السابقة.