Forecast by expected closing month — and why the column total is not the cards

4 min read Updated 2026-08-30 WindoorERP 19.0

What this does

CRM › Reporting › Forecast lays your open opportunities out by the month they are expected to close, with a running total per month. It is the screen that answers "what is likely to land, and when".

Two things about it are easy to get wrong and both change the number you would quote: whose deals it shows, and how the monthly total is calculated.

Before you start

An opportunity only appears if it has an Expected Closing date. Deals without one are absent from the forecast entirely, however large they are.
The Expected Revenue and the probability on each deal are what the forecast is made of. A forecast is only as honest as those two fields.
The screen opens showing your own pipeline, not the company's.

Steps

The Forecast kanban: opportunities in columns by expected closing month, each column headed with its weighted total

The column total is weighted by probability, not the sum of the deals

Each month's figure is the sum of every opportunity's expected revenue multiplied by its probability. It is not what you would get by adding up the amounts on the cards.

The gap is large. On the demonstration data, September's cards add up to 4,030,000 QR while the column reads 1,794k — the weighted figure is under half the raw one, because most of those deals sit at low probabilities.

This is the right way to forecast, but it catches people out: a salesperson reading the card amounts and a manager reading the column heading are quoting two different numbers from the same screen. When you cite a forecast, say which one you mean.

01
Open CRM › Reporting › Forecast.
02
Read the three facets: Upcoming Closings, My Pipeline and Expected Closing: Month. Remove My Pipeline to see the whole team.
03
Read each column heading: the month, and beneath it the forecast total for that month.
04
Drag a card to another month to change its expected closing date — the totals follow immediately.
05
Switch to the graph or pivot with the buttons at the top right when you need the numbers rather than the cards.

My Pipeline is on by default

The My Pipeline facet restricts the board to opportunities assigned to you. A manager opening this screen sees their own deals, not the team's, and the monthly totals are correspondingly small.

Remove the facet for the whole company, or replace it with a grouping by salesperson to compare people's forecasts side by side. This is the single most common reason a forecast "looks wrong".

Reading a column

Month heading	The expected closing month, and the weighted total beneath it.
Progress bar	Splits the column by the state of each deal's next activity, so a bar with a lot of red is a month full of overdue follow-ups.
Card amount	That opportunity's expected revenue, unweighted.
Stars	Priority, set by hand on the deal.
Activity dot	The next activity's state — the colour is what the progress bar is counting.
Won ribbon	A deal already won still appears in the month it was expected to close.
Empty months	Still shown, with a zero, so a gap in the pipeline is visible rather than hidden.

Troubleshooting

The forecast is far smaller than the pipeline	Either My Pipeline is still applied, or you are comparing the weighted column total against raw card amounts.
A big deal is missing	It has no Expected Closing date. Set one and it appears.
The totals never change	Probabilities are not being maintained. The forecast is entirely driven by them.
Everything sits in one month	Expected closing dates are being left at their default rather than set to a realistic date.
A won deal is still counted	Won deals remain in their expected month. Group by Is Won, or use the pipeline for a live view.

Common mistakes

Quoting the column total and the card amounts interchangeably. One is weighted, the other is not.
Reviewing a team's forecast without removing My Pipeline.
Leaving probabilities at their stage default and then treating the forecast as a commitment.
Forgetting that a deal with no expected closing date is invisible here — the pipeline can look healthy while the forecast is empty.

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