A forward-looking projection of expected income based on scheduled billable allocations, active contracts, and pipeline opportunities.
Your accountant can tell you what you billed last month. Your revenue forecast tells you what you'll bill *next* month — and the month after that. One is a receipt; the other is a decision-making tool.
A revenue forecast projects future income by looking at three layers: confirmed allocations on active projects, signed contracts not yet started, and weighted pipeline deals. It's the financial output of everything else you're tracking — resource scheduling, capacity planning, and utilization rates all feeding into one number.
Layer 1: Scheduled billable work (high confidence). Every allocation in your schedule that's tied to a billable project represents expected revenue. Developer allocated 6h/day for three weeks at a €110 billing rate? That's roughly €9,900 in projected revenue. Sum this across all active projects and you've got your baseline.
Layer 2: Signed but unscheduled (medium confidence). A contract is signed for an April start but you haven't created allocations yet. You know the budget (say, €25,000 over two months) even if the specific team members aren't assigned. This adds to the forecast with a small uncertainty margin.
Layer 3: Pipeline deals (low-medium confidence). An SOW is out for review, or you're in final negotiations on a retainer. Weight these by likelihood — a 70% deal adds 70% of its value to the forecast. Optimists skip this weighting and end up disappointed; realists embrace it.
The two biggest mistakes:
Counting hours that won't be billed. If your team is allocated to a fixed-price project and they're already over budget due to scope creep, those extra hours generate zero additional revenue. Your schedule shows work; your forecast should show *billable* work only.
Ignoring time off. A developer scheduled at full capacity for June looks great on the revenue forecast — until you remember they have two weeks of vacation. If your tool doesn't subtract availability reductions automatically, your forecast inflates by exactly those missing hours.
The power of a revenue forecast isn't prediction accuracy — it's the decisions it enables. Forecast showing a revenue dip in Q3? Start selling now, or move placeholder allocations for likely deals to lock in capacity. Forecast showing record revenue in April? Make sure your team has the bandwidth to deliver it, or you'll burn them out chasing numbers that looked great on paper.
WrkSched's profitability forecast combines revenue projections with cost data, so you're not just seeing top-line revenue but actual expected profit margin per project and across the portfolio. That's the view that turns a forecast from a sales tool into an operations tool.
Put these concepts into practice with WrkSched — drag-and-drop scheduling and capacity planning.
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