Sales Forecasting is an important tool to take your restaurant to the next level. Your Location's Sales Forecast can influence inventory, ordering, staffing, and more. To help provide the most accurate forecasts, R365 provides you access to three levels of forecasting: Monthly, Daily, and Hourly Forecasting. 


New to Monthly Forecasting


Check out this blog post on how to get started with Monthly Forecasting, which includes a guide for calculating capacity and year over year (YOY) trends. Once you are comfortable with these areas, head over to the forecasting tool in your database and try out the Smart Forecast feature using YOY trends. Use the Smart Forecast option for this year's date if you do not have historical Net Sales from last year.


Experienced with Monthly Forecasting


Next up is utilizing the Daily Forecasting tool in R365, which enables you to create more accurate daily forecasts. One key aspect that helps make these calculations more accurate is the ability to tag outlier days, or days that have an uncommon amount of Sales due to bad weather, events, promotional periods, etc. These can then be removed from Daily Forecasts for a more accurate representation of Sales.


Daily Forecasting can be even further defined with Hourly Forecasting, an aspect of Smart Labor. We will explore Smart Labor in greater depth in this series!


You will find that many reports with Sales Forecasts tie into Labor. Even without using R365 Scheduling, if your POS imports Labor details into R365, you can benefit from these reports. Check out these resources for Scheduling:


Next Steps