3 min read

Forecastr Beta Update – February 17, 2023

Picture of Admin Admin February 17, 2023

Hey gang, Zack here. I hope you had a lovely Valentine’s Day! We love our Forecastr customers, so we wanted to show our love the best way we know how… with a ton of product updates!

Before we dive into those updates, I’d love to invite you to our #forecastr-customer-feedback Slack channel.

Requirements to join:

  • You must be an active Forecastr customer.
  • Your Company must have a paid Slack account (in order to use Slack Connect).
  • You must be willing to give occasional feedback when requested by the Product Team.

Actively participating in this channel will only take 10-20 minutes per month. If you meet all the criteria above and would like to be invited to our Slack Connect channel, reply to this email and let me know.

Note: This Slack channel is not a replacement for our feature request tool or existing support channels.

Now, let’s check out what’s new with Forecastr:

New and Improved


Modeled Hires

  • We’ve always had a way to model your hires in the platform, but it was clunky and manual and honestly, pretty confusing. Luckily, the official Modeld Hires feature is now live.
  • With new Modeled Hires you can change the Headcount of a People Item (a.k.a. Person) into a Calculation, add Growth Assumptions to it, and more.
  • Those changes will update the Headcount of that Item which flows through to its Category and the People section as a whole.
  • To learn how to use the new feature and/or update your existing manually modeled hires, check out this Help Center article.

Modeled Hires and COGS toggle-1

Modeled Hires Headcount

COGS for People

  • We also added the ability to assign a People Item to COGS. Simply enable the “Cost Of Goods” toggle and the cost will show up in COGS instead of Expenses on the Income Statement.
  • The current COGS toggle is all or nothing, but a future version will let you select what percentage of the cost you want to attribute to COGS vs. OpEx.

Xero Integration

  • We released QuickBooks Online a while back and our customers love it. Now our customers who use Xero can sync and map their accounting Actuals to their Forecastr models and go from Zero to Xero hero!
  • The mapping process for Xero is very similar to QuickBooks; more details about both can be found in this Help Center article.

Xero Integration-1

  • Note: You can currently only connect QuickBooks OR Xero. Future updates will allow you to map from multiple Integrations simultaneously.

Change Variance

  • Speaking of Actuals, we already had Variance on the Financials Tab, but you couldn’t use it on the Assumption Tab. We didn’t have an easy way to indicate if going over budget was a good thing (in situations like Revenue) or a bad thing (like with Expenses).
  • Now, you can see Variance throughout the platform and right-click on any Variance cell and click “Change Variance” to flip the variance logic for that entire row.
  • It’s one of those features that’s easier to understand by using it, so hook up and map your Accounting Integration and try it for yourself.

Change Variance-1

 

UI/UX Improvements

  • Access Links used to be super long, but have been shortened significantly.

Shorter Access Links

  • Access Links no longer show Integrations and Sharing in the dropdown menu to people who don’t need to see those links.

Access Link menu updates

  • The Integration Mapping Page displays which Metric each Account is mapped to and a new alert will now let you know if there are unmapped Accounts.

Integration Mapping Updates

  • On the Assumptions and Financial Tabs, you can now right-click on an Actuals cell and see where that value comes from, similar to Forecast cells.

Integration info

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue where Access Links weren’t loading reliably on the first attempt.
  • Resolved an issue where Drawer updates required a refresh to be seen.
  • Resolved an issue where Commas in One-Time Assumptions caused Salaries to zero out.
  • Resolved an issue where variances were wrong for Annual and Quarterly views.
  • Resolved an issue where Assumption dates were updating when a One-Time metric was changed.
  • Resolved Fixed Asset & Accumulated Depreciation-related items on the Balance Sheet.
  • Resolved an issue with Fixed Asset templates not showing Monthly Depreciation correctly on the Assumption Tab.
  • Resolved a bug where salary adjustments to People were changing which info would load in the drawer.

That's it for this release. Don’t hesitate to email me if you want to join our #forecastr-customer-feedback Slack channel. Stay tuned for future release notes!

Thanks!

Zack Pennington

Head of Product at Forecastr