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What are forecast drivers?
Drivers include non-financial metrics or data outside of your chart of accounts that can be used to forecast financial projections.
Many business owners think about their revenue in terms of how much of a product or service they are delivering, and using drivers can help you model these outcomes closely.
Some examples of drivers include:
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With drivers, you can build out complex formulas to forecast your Profit & Loss values. You can also set up drivers to reflect seasonality to capture these nuances in your forecast.
How to create forecast drivers
To add driver data to your forecast, you’ll want to click on the Drivers tab in the main grid.
From the Drivers area, you can create drivers, define driver categories, and add values for your drivers. You can have as many as 500 drivers displayed in the Drivers grid.
You can add or update drivers in four ways:
Import or update drivers from Excel
You can import up to 200 drivers at a time into your Fathom Forecast.
To import or update drivers from Excel:
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💡Smart Tip: If you only need to update the values for your drivers or only update the attributes (e.g. category, unit of measure, aggregation type), then, before uploading the template, you can select the option you need by clicking on the bolded ‘Values and attributes’ to reveal a dropdown menu.
What will happen to my existing drivers when importing?
Driver imports are designed to be additive, meaning empty fields will not remove data; imports will only create new or update existing drivers, their values, and/or their attributes.
If you are updating existing drivers and leave the attribute fields blank, they will not reset to the defaults, but will instead retain their current in-Fathom attributes.
To modify attributes, you must specify the new attribute choice in the Excel import or edit the driver's settings in Fathom.
To access a driver's settings:
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Enter driver data manually
To add a driver and/or driver data manually:
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Calculate drivers using formulas and other value rules
After you have created a driver in the Drivers Grid, you can calculate the values for the driver by using a driver value rule. Using a value rule can be more efficient than manual entry.
Rule | When to use it... |
Constant/Growing |
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Formula |
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To calculate a driver with a value rule:
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💡Smart Tip: To see the rule(s) used to calculate a driver, click on the name of the driver. This will open a menu on the right-hand side where you can view a timeline of all of the value rules used to calculate the driver. Both manual entries and imports from Excel will appear as direct entries in the rule timeline. Learn more from our 'Audit your forecast' article.
Organise, re-order, delete, and duplicate drivers
To duplicate a driver, change its name or category, delete it, or re-order the driver on the grid:
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To edit a driver category:
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How can I use drivers to calculate my forecast?
Drivers can be used in value rules and loan repayment schedules to calculate Profit & Loss accounts.
For more information about driver-based forecast calculations, see our 'Forecast Revenue, Cost of Sales, and Expenses' article.
For calculating Interest Expense and Interest Revenue accounts with drivers, see our 'Journals & Schedules in Forecasting' article.
Next steps
Continue building your forecast's baseline:
Entered drivers for a microforecast? Continue forecasting what-ifs.
Learn more