Should we switch to a rolling forecast to better handle market shifts?

[Grace_T]

I’m trying to decide if we should switch to a rolling forecast model this quarter. Our static annual budget feels useless every time the market shifts, but I’m worried the constant updating will eat up too much of my team’s time without giving us clearer direction.

[Camila_M]

Last quarter we tried a rolling forecast. We started with four quarters and we updated it monthly. It was a grind to clean the data and align inputs. The decision speed did not noticeably improve. We did see early warnings on headcount and supplier costs but the extra meetings and data wrangling ate into other work.

[Penelope78]

On the other hand we kept it simple and it helped us see where volatility came from. We used a small driver based model for revenue and key costs. The leadership started using those numbers in monthly reviews to set priorities for the next quarter. The time spent was real but manageable with a tight template.

[MilaIS]

Is the real issue the forecast method or something else like governance and decision rights?

[HannahMW]

One thing we did not do well was jumping into a full system upgrade before a scoped pilot. We could run a two quarter pilot for two business units and keep it lean. We would track hours spent on data wrangling and the time to decide and compare to last quarter.