Watch this short video overview
Set SMART Targets to Motivate and Change Behaviours
How you define your Sales Targets is critical to your organisation as it will be a key factor to motivate and drive your sales team. Key Objectives should also be SMART:
- S - Specific
- M - Measurable
- A - Assignable
- R - Relevant
- T - Time based
Using BI4Cloud - Business Intelligence Cool Stuff (Enterprise 5) version, all businesses no matter how small, can now set flexible Monthly sales budgets and easily measure against them, based on all or any of the following key business drivers. Note each Organisation can choose what dimensions/levels to set their Sales Budgets at:
- Who is Selling - Salesperson/Territory
- Who is Buying - Customer/Customer Group/Channel
- What is Sold - Item/Item Group
How to Setup and Enter Sales Budgets in BI4Cloud - Click Here.
How to start creating Sales Budget Favourite reports in BI4Cloud - Click Here.
Get help from a BI Expert to setup Budgets in BI - Book a BI Consulting Appointment
Before you get too deep into setting up your Budgets you should determine exactly what level of detail you wish to track in your Budgets. Please take a look at the following report examples to see the many ways you can report and measure Actual Sales results against Budgeted Sales.
This example has been set up to budget all three of the above dimensions.
- Salesperson
- Item Group- e.g.Crocks/Coolers
- Customer Group - e.g.BigW/BILo
Dashboards
Having a high level Dashboard, available on everyone's phone, that highlights Budget Variances by each of the three key dimensions may be your ultimate goal.
To get there go through the following building blocks to build up your understanding of the data and easily create favourite reports that work for you.
Analyse Type Reports - Simple List
Analyse by Salesperson - Actual v Budget
Analyse by Customer Group - Actual v Budget
Analyse by Item Group - Actual v Budget
Pivot - To see Multiple Dimensions at Once
To learn how to setup and change Pivot reports - Click Here
Pivot Item Group v Salesperson to compare Salesperson performance across Item Groups using the Horizontal Pivot
Pivot Salesperson v Item Group to compare Salesperson performance across Item Groups using the Vertical Pivot
Pivot Customer Group v Sales by Quarter to compare Sales performance across Quarters using the Horizontal Pivot
Pivot Sales by Month v Salesperson to compare Salesperson performance across the year using the Horizontal Pivot 
Visualise - To Really See the Results!
Visualise - Sales v Budget By Month
To Create this Visualisation:
- Click the Visualise Icon on the toolbar or Click Advanced and Report Type Visualise
- Analyse By "Sales by Month" (or Salesperson or Item Group)
- Select the visualisation elements ( Hint: hold down the Control-Key and use Mouse )
- "Total Sales"
- "Total Budget"
- "Cumulative Sales"
- "Cumulative Budget"
- Chart Type - Select Combo
- Click Go
- By default the chart type is Line and all metrics use one Y-Axis. To improve the presentation set the Cumulative Metrics to use a Y2 axis and set the Totals to use Bar Chart. To edit these press the down arrow below the chart X Axis. This allow better monthly comparisons.
- Chose the Total Budget in the list and set the Chart Type to Bar. Repeat this for the Total Sales metric. You can also control Chart colors.
- Next choose the Cumulative Budget and set it's chart Axis to Y2. Repeat this for the Cumulative Sales.
- Choosing a separate Axis enables diffrent scale to be calculated from the Month Sales and Budget and produces a chart with better proportions.
- Press Apply
Visualise - Sales v Variance by Customer group
To Create this Visualisation:
- DO NOT press Advanced Icon but instead press the "Customer Group" in the breadcrumbs under the toolbar - it's highlighted in the previous Visualisation screen.
- This takes you to the Advanced screen but remembers all of the existing selections and filters.
- Choose the visualisation "Table (Ungrouped)"
- Change the dimensions to Total Sales and Variance this time and press Go
The interim result is a table visualisation like the one below.
- Click the Format ikon (looks like a Spanner in top Left)
- Tick Custom Layout# to set your own Colours and Thresholds
- Complete the options as per below
- Make the Threshold 0 to highlight Variances above and below Budget
Dashboards
Dashboards are simple to build with BI4cloud. Simply create a number of Visualisations or other Favourite Reports and put them together as a Dashboard
Using Other charting tools
You can export your data to Excel and create some interesting charts using Excel like this.
Read how to create charts like this in excel using the table data generated in BI4Cloud http://www.criticaltosuccess.com/5-top-budget-vs-actual-excel-charts-you-need/
Creating Sales Budget Report Favourites
Item Sales Budget data only appears in the Item Sales Budget report mapping. There are no Preset Favourite Reports based on the Item Sales Budget report because the budget levels and dimensions you set up will be unique to your organisation. As such you will need to create your own new Favourites.
Click Companies to choose the company to report on.
Choose Company
Choose Mapping - Item Sales Budgets
Select Dimensions, Dates and Filters and press Go
See the report output of this selection here.
