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Can I forecast future years for accounting data?
OAS 7.0
I am attempting to make a forecast for future accounting data based on previous years og transaction. At this point it is essentially the attributes "Year" and "Amount". I have data from 2016 onward and would like to create a forecast for 2024, 2025 and so on.
My problem is that I don't really understand how to make to make the forecast appear in the workbook. I am using a linechart, applying the forecast and then I cannot really see the forecast, although the statistics option to apply forecast does appear greyed out.
Is it something I do not understand here? Is this intended use, or not really? My user story is that I want to use historical accounting data to make an indication of budgets for the next 4 years, ideally broken down by some more attributes like department.
Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
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Hi Kristian,
It all depends on your data types.
Here's Amounts by Year and the Year is of data type "Text":
Here's Amounts by Year and the Year is of data type "Number":
Here's Amounts by Year and the Year is of data type "Date":
And bingo...here's your forecast :)
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Answers
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You need to have a measure column then you will be able to use Forecast without any issues.
In the below example it's displaying forecast of Revenue by Year, where Revenue being a measure.
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That is what I am attempting to do. The one with the grey background is the one with forecast turned on, but it looks the same (and the numbers are also the same) - I had expected there to be a 3 more years on the x-axis, a confidence interval and a line for 3 more years based on the attribute year (år) and measure amount (beløp).
Am I missing something?
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The data type for år (year) is Date (unless there are specific date datatypes that I am not using), which I am using.
As linked in my pictures I am able to choose the forecasting option, there just seem to not appear, which is why I am a bit confused.
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@Kristian B. Joergensen , this is the right-click way of doing forecast on your viz. Should work exactly as @Christian Berg described (https://youtu.be/N0PNjTtHsyI), let us know if not.
In addition to this, you can also
- manually build logical calculations on your workbook with the forecast formula, that should enable you to visualize and aggregate the results as well (https://youtu.be/1WoWCOoOGRQ)
- or, persist forecast calculations using data flows. There are many options to do time series forecasts using dataflows, which will persist the results in a dataset (this video shows you the example with Database analytics, but there is another option as well wihtout the dB https://youtu.be/LuMTLlhq2-M)
Let us know if you need more details on these
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This solved it for me, it seems that there was indeed something "wrong" about my year attribute, so I exported the historical data, and the viz worked right away when I uploaded it.
Thanks to all contributors, I am always amazed on how quickly my problems are solved.
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This is not the case here, but to add to the conversation for future readers, ensure that you do not have any null value/(s) in your date fields (x-axis). There is an issue wherein null values get treated as 01/01/1900 which will skew the result. So, you could get similar output results. This is being worked on, and resolved soon.
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