Forecast Line Item Changes

We've made some changes to how actuals are incorporated and used within a Forecast.  Up to now, we would create a forecast by merging actuals with plan line items to create combined forecast line items consisting of actual values in historical periods and forecast values in the remaining periods.  We refer to these as "stitched" line items.  With this release, we will no longer stitch together plan and actual line items, and will now bring actuals in as separate line items.  See Upcoming Changes to Forecasts for more details.

Note that these changes will result in the "unstitching" of line items in existing forecasts, meaning that when you open an existing forecast, you will now see 2 line items - one for actuals and one for plan/forecast - where there used to be a single stitched line item.

The main reason for doing this was to allow you to make changes to forecast line item attributes.  Previously, you were only able to edit the forecast values, description and comment fields; all other fields were read-only.  This was because changing attributes that could potentially affect line item granularity would result in incorrect amounts for actuals (e.g., you created your forecast using cost center & account & vendor as the line item granularity and you subsequently change the vendor in a forecast line item).  Another reason was to provide more flexibility in summarizing actuals with forecast values.  Previously, you could not group or summarize actuals to something other than the line item granularity specified during forecast creation.

With these changes, you can now edit any field within a forecast line item.  And with multi-level grouping (see What’s New in May 18 Release) you can easily recreate the combined actuals + forecast line items using grouped views, and even create views that combine actuals and forecast line items differently than the original forecast line item granularity.  And for groupings containing a single forecast line item (with possibly multiple actuals line items), you are able to directly edit the forecast values in the group header (see Editable Group Headers in What’s New in May 18 Release).  In effect, we allow you to dynamically stitch together actual and forecast line items to produce editable line items rather than generate fixed stitchings during forecast creation.  (To support maximum flexibility, we recommend bringing actuals into forecasts at their most granular detail rather than just cost center & account).

Email Notifications Documentation

Email notifications are not new, but have generated a fair number of questions from customers over time.  As a result, our documentation team has put together a new help topic that documents the e-mail notifications we generate, what triggers them, and includes examples of the email messages.

To learn more, see Manage email notifications.