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Can I forecast future years for accounting data?

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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!

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Best Answer

  • 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 :)

Answers

  • Rank 8 - Analytics Strategist

    @Kristian B. Joergensen

    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.


  • Rank 4 - Community Specialist


    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?



  • Rank 4 - Community Specialist

    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.

  • @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

  • Rank 4 - Community Specialist

    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.

  • 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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