Future sales

For our next analysis, let's turn back to the QuantoBikes sales process, focusing on two simple steps: booking a sales order, and sending an invoice based on the sales order.

You can calculate the actual sales (and purchases, for that matter) from the invoices in our model. A common question to ask is: how will sales develop through the rest of the year? One part of the answer to this question deals with sales forecasting and the sales pipeline. These are very useful things to analyze, although they come with inherent uncertainty.

A much more specific part of the answer comes from looking at sales orders that have not been (fully) invoiced yet. After all, a sales order is typically booked when the customer agrees to the sale, but the corresponding invoice is sometimes sent on a later date. So, what could be easier than determining what sales orders have not been invoiced yet, or at least, not completely?

Well, a lot of things are easier than that, but...