Enter your projected monthly revenue directly when StartSmart's guided sales forecasting questions don't fit your business.
StartSmart normally helps you build your revenue projections by asking guided questions about your expected orders, customers, sales, pricing, and other factors that drive revenue.
However, not every business generates revenue in a way that can be easily represented by these questions. If you already have your own revenue projections or your business has unique or highly variable revenue assumptions, you can choose to manually enter your projected revenue instead.
When should I manually enter revenue?
Manual revenue entry may be a better option if:
You already calculated your revenue projections outside of StartSmart and simply want to enter the results.
Your sales or revenue model doesn't fit StartSmart's guided forecasting questions.
Your projected revenue varies significantly from month to month and isn't easily calculated using consistent sales assumptions.
You want complete control over the revenue amount projected for each month.
When you use this option, StartSmart will use the monthly revenue amounts you enter rather than calculating revenue from your answers to the guided sales forecasting questions.
How to manually enter your revenue
Go to the Revenue section of StartSmart.
Select the Manually Input Revenue Data checkbox.
Once selected, the guided revenue questions will be replaced with fields that allow you to enter your projected revenue directly for each month of each year in your financial projections. The entry screen works similarly to the monthly input fields used for expenses.
Enter the revenue you expect your business to generate for each month and continue through the remaining sections of StartSmart.
StartSmart will use these amounts when generating your projected financial statements and other financial projections.
What happens to my Sales Forecast?
When you choose to manually enter revenue, StartSmart no longer needs to forecast your orders and sales because you are providing the resulting revenue forecast yourself.
For this reason, StartSmart automatically hides:
The Sales Forecast page from the sidebar menu.
The Sales Forecast cards from the Dashboard page.
This is intentional. Those features are based on the sales and order assumptions collected through StartSmart's guided revenue questions and therefore would no longer apply when you override that process by entering revenue directly.
Your manually entered revenue becomes the revenue forecast StartSmart uses throughout your financial projections.
Can I switch back to the guided revenue questions?
If you decide that you'd rather have StartSmart calculate your revenue projections using its guided questions, return to the Revenue section and uncheck the Manually Input Revenue Data checkbox.
You can then use StartSmart's standard revenue forecasting process to build your projections based on your sales assumptions.