It’s important to understand how the CRM part of Acumatica addresses sales forecasting and opportunities. Acumatica comes out of the box utilizing a seven-step sales funnel/process. These steps are customizable to match your business needs. You can have multiple processes defined, and within each of them you can add, change, and remove stages to fit your business’ needs.
What is a sales funnel?
Think of this as a leaky funnel, into which you can “drop-in” sales opportunities. It is meant to visually represent the sales process from initial contact to final sale. As opportunities move through the sales process (the steps in the funnel), they might get removed or changed as the sale progresses. Therefore, the time to close decreases, and the probability of the sale occurring increases.
Where does the data come from?
In Acumatica, the data that populates the sales funnel is coming from the opportunities you enter. More specifically, the funnel is built on the specific opportunity stage and the revenue forecasted is coming from those related probabilities.
Here are the out of the box Acumatica stages and related probabilities:
For example, let’s say you entered an opportunity into Acumatica for $65,000. You enter the stage as “Nurture.” The system calculates the forecasted revenue from the probability percentage. In this example, 15% of $65,000 = $9,750.00.
Customizing the opportunity
Of course these 7 stages don’t fit every business. You can customize them and include additional classes. At the top level, there is an Acumatica Opportunity Class. For each Opportunity Class, you can configure the relationship between opportunity stages and probabilities of deal closure. You can also rearrange the default order of the predefined stages, modify the number of stages by adding or removing items, and adjust the probabilities. For example, here is the “Direct” opportunity class, and in this window, you can see the stages, whether or not they are active, and their correlating probabilities.
No matter your business, Acumatica is flexible to suit your business needs. Before you dive into configuring the sales tools in Acumatica, make sure you know your own business process. We find many of our customers don’t use the forecasting tools, only because they don’t know or have defined business processes. For more helpful Acumatica tips, delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our blog.
