Setting up Account-Based Forecasting is one of the first admin tasks on a Manufacturing Cloud project. The high-level path below assumes Manufacturing Cloud is provisioned and your products and accounts already exist. Always confirm the exact steps against current Salesforce Help for your release.
- Enable Manufacturing Cloud features
In Setup, turn on the Manufacturing Cloud and account forecasting settings for your org. This exposes the Sales Agreement and Account Forecast objects and their related tabs.
- Define forecast configuration
Choose the period type (monthly or quarterly), the forecast horizon, and which sources feed the forecast, such as active sales agreements and open opportunities. Decide whether to start with basic Account-Based Forecasting or Advanced Account Forecasting.
- Set up metrics and formulas
Configure the forecast measures you care about, such as quantity and revenue, and the formulas that calculate actuals against commitment. For Advanced Account Forecasting, build a forecast set with the dimensions and measures that match how you plan.
- Generate and review forecasts
Run the forecast generation job, then open an account to review the rolled-up numbers by product and period. Let planners adjust figures by hand where they have better information.
Whether the forecast buckets by month or quarter. Pick the cadence your sales and finance teams already run on.
Which records contribute, typically active sales agreements plus open opportunities and their product schedules.
The numbers you forecast, such as quantity, revenue, or margin, surfaced per account, product, and period.
Basic Account-Based Forecasting is quicker to stand up; Advanced Account Forecasting adds custom dimensions and forecast sets at the cost of more setup.
- Only active sales agreements feed committed forecast numbers; draft and approved agreements affect planned figures differently, so check the status rules before trusting a forecast.
- Without an ERP integration feeding actual orders back in, actuals-against-commitment reporting is incomplete and the platform value drops sharply.
- Advanced Account Forecasting relies on a data processing engine template; a misconfigured forecast set or dimension source yields blank or wrong numbers that are hard to debug later.