Financial Forecasting for the New Year: What Businesses Need to Know

8 min read

December 12th, 2024

Every new year brings new challenges and opportunities in business. It's up to business owners to ensure they are prepared for what lies ahead in the coming year. The best business leaders keep a continuous eye on the future.

 They thoroughly understand their current and past performance and use their data to best predict and plan for future business outcomes - rather than reacting after a problem arises or acting too late and missing out on a valuable opportunity. Smart business financial planning through financial forecasting enables proactive leadership. Read on to learn how to use forecasting to prepare your business for the new year.  

What Is Financial Forecasting?

Financial forecasting is a process that uses current market conditions, historical financial data, and additional information to estimate a business's future performance and financial health. 

Types of Financial Forecasts

Business leaders can generate forecasts for just about any aspect of their business. Some of the most commonly used forecasts include:

Sales Forecast

A sales forecast attempts to predict how much revenue a business will generate in sales over a future period (i.e. the coming months, year, or years). Established businesses can evaluate their past performance and sales trends in addition to any seasonality within the business and market trends to make an educated guess about what sales will look like in the future. 

Read More: The Pros and Cons of Outsourced Accounting Services for Businesses

Expense Forecast

Expense forecasts are also commonly used. These attempt to estimate how much money the business will need to spend to maintain (and/or grow) its operations. Businesses use expense forecasting to anticipate and prepare for predictable future expenses (i.e. payroll, utilities, insurance, loans, and rent) and those that can occur unexpectedly (i.e. repairs, equipment replacement, or changing materials/supplier costs).

Income Forecast

After thoroughly considering your sales and expense forecasts, you can use those estimates to forecast income, attempting to answer the question, "How much profit do you expect your business to generate?" Income forecasts are useful for leadership to keep an eye on setting realistic goals. Income forecasting can also be beneficial for businesses that are attempting to raise capital through investors or lenders. They can help to demonstrate the business's future ability to generate stakeholder payouts or to repay a loan. 

Cash Flow Forecast

A cash flow statement shows the amount of money flowing into and out of a business over a set period of time. Cash flow can also be predicted through forecasting. It's most accurately forecasted when you have some idea about the timing of when money will be earned and when it will be paid. However, even if you don't know the exact timing, understanding whether you expect to experience positive or negative cash flow in the coming months or years can be exceptionally beneficial because a cash flow shortage is, perhaps, the most catastrophic challenge any business can face without a plan in place to bridge the cash flow gap. 

How Do Forecasts Differ From Financial Projections for Businesses?

The terms "forecast" and "projection" are often used interchangeably, but they do have slightly different meanings in business finances.

• Financial Forecast - A forecast represents your most reasonable expectation of your business's future financial position. 
• Financial Projection - A financial projection represents a reasonable expectation of your business's future financial position in the event of one or more hypothetical scenarios or assumptions. Financial projections can also sometimes be referred to as "scenario forecasts." 

Financial projections are highly useful and prudent for business leaders to consider in addition to basic forecasts. Projects enable business leaders to run numbers based on best-case or worst-case "what if" scenarios. This allows you to model potential challenges or opportunities from a financial perspective and put contingency plans in place. This is incredibly useful in the event one or more of these hypothetical conditions become reality. 

How Does Forecasting Differ From Business Budgeting?

The difference between financial forecasting and budgeting is also subtle. Forecasting is the process of predicting expected outcomes, while budgeting is the process of planning a business's actual spending and revenue generation over a given period (usually one year). 

While forecasting helps business leaders decide what kinds of budgets they can create, the actual budget is what sets the company's spending and earning goals. 

How to Create Accurate Financial Forecasts for Your Business in the New Year (9 Best Practices)

1. Understand Your Goals

You can set financial forecasting goals by thinking about your business's goals. Look at forecasting as a way to determine whether or not your current goals are feasible and to find out what you need to do to make achieving them possible. 

For example, if you want to open another location, expand with additional services, or begin serving another market segment, then you can look at the anticipated costs of achieving those goals and the cash flow available to cover your current business expenses along with the additional costs that expanding will likely incur. 

2. Know Your Numbers

It's possible to put together a financial forecast in a startup that has no financial history, but forecasting is much simpler and way more accurate for businesses with historical financial data. Maintaining good financial records not only keeps your business compliant, audit-ready, and tax-read, but it also enables you to generate more accurate financial forecasts. 

3. Forecast as a Team

Forecasting is most accurately accomplished with input from your whole team, across departments. You'll generate the most reliable forecasts when you get input regarding anticipated spending, revenue, challenges, opportunities, and changes from all of your functional departments such as marketing, sales, finance, operations, IT, and human resources. 

4. Assess the Competition

If your own historical financial data is limited, take a look at your competition. Assess their business model and their numbers. Then consider how your business might perform differently. How will your unique value proposition set you apart? How will this impact your performance?

5. Consider External Factors

Looking at your business's past performance, current numbers, and trends is a great place to start, but it is also important to consider external factors that could impact your future financial position such as industry changes, new technology, new competitors, market trends, inflation, economic booms or busts, regulatory changes, etc. What's happening currently and what's likely to happen in the near future? Take these external factors into consideration when generating your estimates. 

Read More: Financial Reports vs. Management Reports: What’s the Difference?

6. Be Reasonable

Some business leaders can be overly optimistic while others readily look at more pessimistic scenarios. Remember, though, that in financial forecasting, the goal is to generate numbers that represent likely outcomes. Save your optimism and pessimism for projections or scenario forecasting. 

7. Perform a Sensitivity Test

A sensitivity test is a process of changing individual factors within your forecasts and financial models to determine how big of an impact those changes have on the final results. Some numbers that only change a little might have an enormous impact. If something goes wrong in a sensitive area, then the consequences could be dire. So, these represent areas where business leaders need to be the most vigilant in terms of planning, budgeting, monitoring, and keeping an eye on budget vs. actuals.

8. Use Rolling 12-Month Forecasts for Better Business Budgeting

The modern business landscape is fast-paced and ever-changing. As a result, the budget you worked so hard to put together before January 1st could become drastically outdated by the end of the first quarter. To remedy this problem, business leaders can use rolling 12-month expense and revenue forecasts to create a more dynamic and easily adjustable budget. 

Whether you use this type of forecast-based budgeting model or a more traditional business budget, it is essential that you revisit your budget regularly to compare each month's actual numbers with your budgeted (and predicted) numbers. When surpluses or deficits occur, you will need to think on your feet and be prepared to make adjustments to your plan. 

9. Implement Automation and Advanced Forecasting Technology

Forecasting is best accomplished with complete and accurate data. You can improve accuracy and access real-time financial information by automating your manual back-office processes for streamlined data collection and real-time report generation. Additionally, some of the most advanced financial management technology are now implementing machine-learning and artificial intelligence to streamline forecasting, strengthen financial modeling, and automate trend and anomaly detection so you can have a financial assistant working for you around the clock. 

Prepare Your New Year Business Forecast and Projections With Ease and Expertise

Many small business leaders struggle to get a handle on their back offices. They struggle to maintain accurate and well-organized records that enable them to generate reliable, timely, and accurate financial reports. In these cases, financial forecasting can be a significant challenge. If you don't know your numbers or don't have time to maintain your back office while also running your business, then outsourced accounting is a good option for you. 

Outsourced accounting service providers can act like an arm of your company - without costing you an arm and a leg. For a fraction of the cost of hiring an in-house bookkeeping and accounting department, outsourced accounting can afford your business an entire back-office team, along with tried-and-true technology, tools, accounting systems, and bookkeeping processes that can help you get your back office into order before the new year.

With a well-ordered back office and efficient bookkeeping and accounting operations, you can automate forecasting, financial modeling, projections, and budgeting to improve your business's financial health and ensure you are well-prepared to weather any storm that 2025 might bring. 

Make this year your most profitable year yet. 

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