Sales Forecast Template
Committed, best case and total pipeline against quota, period by period.
Details
sales forecast templateUploads
Your logo
A photo or picture
Goes on this page only. Drag it anywhere and pull its corner to resize it.
Your signature
Draw it with a finger, a mouse or a trackpad, and it goes on the page like a picture.
Pictures and signatures stay on this device. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
Red highlights mark what is still blank. Click anything on the page to change it. Your draft is kept on this device as you work.
| Owner | [owner] |
| Period | [date] to [date] |
| Quota | $ [amount] |
| Period | Committed | Best case | Pipeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| [add one period per line] |
What is a Sales Forecast?
A sales forecast is the number the business plans against: what will close in this period, how confident you are, and how that compares with quota. It is not the same as the pipeline. The pipeline lists everything open; the forecast is the judgement about which parts of it will land. Get it consistently wrong in either direction and the damage lands on hiring, stock and cash rather than on the sales team.
Representatives submit a call, managers roll it up, and finance uses the result for cash flow, purchasing and headcount decisions. The cadence is usually weekly within a quarter and monthly across the year. Founders in small companies do the same exercise informally and then act on it as though it were reliable. The audience matters: your manager wants to know which deals you are committing to, while finance wants a total it can plan against without knowing any deal names.
Where the numbers go changes the rules. In a listed company an internal forecast can amount to inside information, and its disclosure is governed by rules such as Regulation FD in the US, the Market Abuse Regulation in the UK and EU, continuous disclosure obligations in Australia and SEBI's listing regulations in India — do not circulate one outside the approved channel. Separately, the date a deal is booked is rarely the date revenue is recognised, since recognition follows IFRS 15 or ASC 606. Ask finance which basis your forecast is meant to be on.
A forecast does not report results and should never be reused as though it did. It is not a commission statement — commission follows the plan document and the actual booking. It commits nothing to a customer, and a deal in commit is not a signed order. It also does not replace the pipeline report: a forecast with no underlying deal list cannot be challenged, and a number that cannot be challenged is a guess with a spreadsheet built around it.
What to put in a Sales Forecast
These are the details this template asks for. Anything left blank is marked in red on the preview so you can see what is still missing.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Business name | For example: Barton Supply Co. |
| Your address | For example: Unit 7, Barton Road, Columbus, OH 43212 |
| Account owner | For example: Sarah Chen |
| Period from | Free text |
| Period to | Free text |
| Quota for the period | For example: 90,00,000 |
| Forecast | One per line: Period | Committed | Best case | Total pipeline |
| What the forecast assumes optional | For example: Assumes Northgate signs in September. If it slips a month, committed drops by 425,000 and… |
How to write a Sales Forecast
Fix the period and the unit of measure
Decide whether you are forecasting bookings, invoiced revenue or recognised revenue, and whether the figure is total contract value, annual value or the amount landing in this period. Write the definition at the top of the sheet. Most forecast arguments are not disagreements about deals — they are two people using the same word for two different numbers.
Define each category in writing
Commit, best case and pipeline mean nothing until you say what evidence puts a deal in each. Commit might require a verbal yes, a named signatory, an understood purchase order process and a date the customer has confirmed. Best case might need two of those four. Publish the definitions and apply them to everyone's deals the same way, including your own.
Make every close date defensible
A close date should come from the customer's process — the board meeting on the twelfth, the budget year ending in March — not from the end of your quarter. Ask what has to happen between now and then, and if the rep cannot list the steps, the date is not real. Dates clustering on the last day of the period are the clearest warning sign in any forecast.
Keep weighted pipeline separate from commit
Show commit and best case as named deals, and the remaining pipeline as a weighted figure if you want one, but never add a weighted number to a committed one and present the sum as the forecast. They answer different questions. Weighting is a portfolio estimate that behaves sensibly only across many deals; commit is a specific promise about a small number of them.
Compare last period's call with what happened
Every cycle, put your previous forecast next to the actual outcome and list the deals that moved. Two or three periods of that shows whether you habitually over-call, under-call or simply mis-date. Nothing improves forecast accuracy faster than being made to look at your own record, and no amount of methodology substitutes for doing it.
Common mistakes
- Adding weighted pipeline to committed deals and presenting the total as the forecast, which inflates the number while hiding how it was built.
- Letting close dates default to the last day of the quarter, so every deal slips together and the whole period misses at once.
- Forecasting on total contract value while finance plans on the amount recognised in the period, which produces a cash shortfall nobody can explain.
- Holding a deal back in best case to protect a bonus, which leaves the business under-resourced when the deal lands anyway.
- Changing the category definitions mid-year, which destroys comparison against earlier periods and any chance of measuring accuracy at all.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between commit and best case?
Commit is what you are prepared to be held to: the customer has effectively decided, the approval path is known, and the date is theirs rather than yours. Best case is what could land if things go your way. The distinction works only if the evidence for each is written down, otherwise commit drifts into meaning the deals you happen to feel good about this week.
How accurate should a sales forecast be?
There is no universal benchmark worth quoting, and a useful target depends on deal size, cycle length and how many deals make up the number. What matters more is consistency of bias: a team that is reliably a little low is easier to plan around than one that is wildly right and wrong in turn. Track your own variance over several periods and set an internal target from that.
How do I forecast with no sales history?
Build it from the deals rather than from conversion rates you do not have. Count them, state the value and the customer-confirmed date for each, and forecast only what you can defend deal by deal. Say explicitly that it is a bottom-up call with no historical weighting behind it, and revise weekly. Once you have twenty or thirty closed deals, derive rates from your own record instead.
Should the forecast use bookings or revenue?
Ask finance, then write the answer on the template. Sales teams naturally forecast bookings, because that is what they control. Finance often needs revenue in the period, which for subscriptions and staged delivery can be a fraction of the booking. Many companies forecast both in adjacent columns, which is more work but stops two functions quoting different numbers to the same board.
How often should a sales forecast be updated?
Weekly during a quarter is the common rhythm for business-to-business teams, with a fuller review at month end. Update it when something changes rather than only when the meeting comes round: a slipped board date or a departed champion should move the forecast that day. Long-cycle capital sales can work monthly, while transactional teams sometimes work daily near a period close.
This page explains general practice and is not legal advice. Requirements differ between countries and, in some cases, between states — check what applies where the document will be used.