I have a daily revenue table, for which I use Quicksight’s Forecasting feature to forecast for the next 30 days. At the same time, I want to create a “customized narrative”, which can tell me the sum of the forecasted revenue for the month we’re in.
Ex: Assuming we have revenue results up until Apr 17th, I can successfully use the forecast feature to forecast daily revenue until mid June. However, I cannot create a custom narrative (or any other view for that matter) that displays the aggregated forecast for the whole month of April. I need to stay at the daily grain for an accurate forecast, so changing the aggregation level to “monthly” does not help.
Is it possible to do this in Quicksight as of now? The “custom narrative” functions seem very promising, but I couldn’t figure it out on my own.
Hi @bozkir unfortunately this is not possible today. When you create a narrative version of the forecast, the only value that is surfaced in the narrative is the furthest value out into the future based on the number of periods you’ve selected. (e.g., if you have a daily forecast set to predict 14 periods, you will only be able to express the value of “14 days from (end of dataset)” in the narrative. Being able to do more with our forecasting data is a common feature request, though. Perhaps you can say more about what you’d like to achieve? e.g., who is the audience, or what other analytics you would do with this data? Thanks!
Hi Chris, thanks a lot for the quick reply. Certainly love the forecasting feature and want to do more with it!
My main customer is sales leadership, and therefore they would like to know “what’s most likely to happen” in the next 1-2 months, and so I needed a way to say “Apr-23 forecast is $780K.” This aggregation would be the first ask, and potentially the next step would be able to some simple calculations on it, like “Apr-23 is forecasted at $780K, +4.5% MoM from Mar-23.” where Mar-23 result is actual, and not a forecast.
@bozkir Cool! That use case makes sense. Like I said, feature requests similar to this are common so I will add your context to those and post back here when we have improvements on the roadmap. Cheers.
