Financial projections in a business plan normally start with the sales forecast. Sales refers to the monetary amount from the sale of goods or services in which the business normally trades. This sales forecast spreadsheet will help you to calculate total sales for use in our financial projections template.
Our article on sales projections gives further details of the sales forecasting methods used for a product or service business.
The sales forecast spreadsheet, which is available for download below, helps estimate sales for the next five years. The excel spreadsheet can deal with up to four unit based and four non unit based products or services. Unit prices can be uplifted for each of the five years by a fixed percentage to allow for inflation and price increases.
Using the Sales Forecast Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet is available for download below and is used as follows:
Enter units information
Enter the product name and an estimate of the number of units of the product which the business plans to sell for each of the next five years. If you simply want to uplift each year based on the previous year, a formula can be entered into the cell instead of a numeric amount. For example, for Product 1, if you wanted Year 2 (cell E4) to be 5% higher than Year 1 (cell D4), in cell E4 you would enter =D4*105%, and copy this formula across to each cell up to cell H4.
Enter the unit price information
Enter the unit price of each product for Year 1, and the uplift percentage required for the following four years.
The uplift is the expected percentage change in the unit price of the product over the year, for example, if the unit price for Year 1 is 12.00 and the expected uplift is 2%, then the price in Year 2 would be 12.00 x 102% = 12.24, and the price in Year 3 would be 12.24 x 102% = 12.48 and so on until year 5. If you anticipate the prices falling, then enter a negative percentage.
The sales forecast spreadsheet calculates the unit prices, the monetary sales value for each product, and the total product sales for each of the five years.
Enter the other sales information
For completeness, the sales forecast spreadsheet allows the sales of up to four non unit based products to be entered. The amount to enter is the total monetary value of each type of sale for each year. This allows a business to enter supplementary sales such as service income, or rental and hire income etc. to establish a complete picture of the total sales of the business for each year.
Finally, the sales forecast spreadsheet calculates the total other sales and the total sales of the business for each of the next five years. This sales forecast can now be used as the starting point in our financial projections template.
Sales Forecast Spreadsheet Download
The sales forecast spreadsheet is available for download in Excel format by following the link below.
Users use this sales forecast spreadsheet at their own risk. We make no warranty or representation as to its accuracy and we are covered by the terms of our legal disclaimer, which you are deemed to have read. This is a sales forecast excel template that you might use when sales forecasting in Excel. It is purely illustrative of a sales forecasting tool. This is not intended to reflect general standards or targets for any particular company or sector. If you do spot a mistake in the sample sales forecast template, please let us know and we will try to fix it.
About the Author
Chartered accountant Michael Brown is the founder and CEO of Plan Projections. He has worked as an accountant and consultant for more than 25 years and has built financial models for all types of industries. He has been the CFO or controller of both small and medium sized companies and has run small businesses of his own. He has been a manager and an auditor with Deloitte, a big 4 accountancy firm, and holds a degree from Loughborough University.