Financial Forecasting Web App

Synopsis:

Development and implementation of a custom Apex / Visualforce oriented financial forecasting, which allowed the business managers and operational staff to forecast revenue generation through the life of multi-year contracts.

Detailed Description:

Prior to introducing CRM, the business, which had been growing aggressively through acquisition, was still using macro-enabled excel spreadsheets to forecast what was referred to as the “orderbook”. These tools were at breaking point due to the volume of data, and regularly had to be rebuilt by an ever dwindling number of Accounts & Finance employees who had the technical capability to fix issues in Microsoft Excel.

The risk of not having accurate and timely data in these sheets had a knock on effect in various elements of the business, most notably production of management accounts, and the ability to cross reference customer statements with work that had been carried out on site in a given period. This was leading to an increase in overdue debt, so a time-saving technical solution inside Salesforce (their CRM) was proposed.

The build revolved about a series of custom objects (orderbook, total months and orderbook entries), which aggregated into the standard Order object. Using this, we were able to deliver a completely customised, yet familiar method of entering data for the business, which mimicked the Orderbook spreadsheets users had spent years using.

Business unit managers were trained on how to adjust the forecasts throughout the course of the month, and upcoming months to give greater forward visibility on revenue generation, and a number of formula fields were created on the orderbook entry records, that enabled the business to forecast both gross and operating profit ground-up on a project by project basis.

Industry:

• Construction

Project:

• Financial Forecasting Web App

Technologies :

• Salesforce Sales Cloud

• APEX

• Visualforce