Best Practices for Revenue Forecasting in 2026

Most teams use a planning board to answer one question: “Who is doing what next week?”

But scheduling is not only about keeping people busy. There’s a more important question hiding behind it: “How much money are we going to make next month?”

Your expected revenue forecast is not something that should live only in Excel or in your accounting software. It should be directly connected to your schedule.

Because revenue is created by work — and work is visible on your timeline.

Important Considerations, Models and Approaches

Before we dig deeper into best practices for predicting your financial results, we need to look at different models and approaches. Understanding these concepts is critical for assessing the accuracy of revenue forecasts.

Four Types of Work and Their Forecast Accuracy

Time & Material (High Accuracy). In this case, financial predictability is strong and straightforward: Revenue = scheduled hours × hourly rate. Invoicing is usually done on a monthly basis, which makes cashflow highly predictable.

Fixed Price (Forecast Volatility). Revenue is predicted based on scheduled hours, but the work may be completed sooner or later than expected. This is one of the reasons why maintaining historical data is important — it helps improve forecast accuracy based on previous periods. Invoicing in this model is usually milestone-based, making cashflow less predictable.

SLA Work (Forecast Volatility). Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts, common in software development agencies, add another layer to revenue forecasting. In SLA-based work, clients typically pay a fixed monthly fee in exchange for guaranteed availability, response times, or a predefined number of support hours. On paper, this creates highly predictable revenue — often even more stable than classic Time & Material projects. However, SLA work competes with project work for the same resources. If a client suddenly consumes more support hours than expected, your team’s capacity is reallocated. This can silently reduce availability and negatively affect revenue from other projects.

Internal, Non-Billable Work (High Accuracy). Not all work generates revenue. Internal initiatives, training, or community projects still consume valuable hours. In ResourcePlanner, you can set the billing rate to zero for non-billable projects, so any allocated time reflects cost without inflating revenue. This transparency allows you to see the impact of internal work on company revenue — if many resources spend time on non-billable projects, the forecasted revenue will drop accordingly, even if everyone is busy. From an accuracy perspective, if this time is strictly time-boxed, the financial impact is clearly measurable.

Two Forecasting Models

Sales Pipeline Forecast: Focuses on the probability of closing deals in the sales pipeline. It is extremely important to forecast sales — without sales, there is no billable work to deliver. Almost every CRM, such as Pipedrive, provides sales predictions. However, once you sell, you still need to deliver in order to get paid.

Resource-Driven Forecast: Focuses on the actual planned work of the team and converts scheduled hours into projected revenue.

Vacation Clustering

Vacations, public holidays, and sick leave reduce capacity. Without accounting for time off, your forecast will overestimate revenue. Encourage your team to record planned vacations early so the schedule and revenue forecast adjust accordingly. This prevents cash-flow surprises when multiple people are away at the same time.

The Role of Historical Records

Forecasts are predictions — they won’t always match reality. The value of historical records lies in the ability to compare forecasted revenue to actual revenue, identify seasonal patterns, and track year-over-year growth.

If your goal is 10% growth this year, your monthly forecast should already be approximately 10% higher than last year. If it isn’t, your growth target may not be realistic.

Best Practices for Revenue Forecasting

Centralise data: Keep capacity, schedules, milestone tracking, and rates in one system. Resource Planner allows you to set rates per role or project so forecasts reflect revenue mix accurately.

Forecast from capacity constraints first: Start with available team members and working hours, including vacations and sick leave trends. Your forecast cannot exceed physical reality.

Monitor overbooking and underutilization: Overbooking inflates forecasts, while underutilization signals lost revenue opportunities.

Update continuously: Forecasts are living dashboards. Update schedules as projects change, new deals close, or staff availability shifts.

Include internal work in planning, but keep it strictly time-boxed: Don’t ignore non-billable projects. Set their rate to zero so the forecast reflects their impact on revenue, but keep their allocation within reasonable limits.

Track and improve: Regularly compare forecasted revenue to actual revenue and adjust your assumptions based on historical performance.

Final Thought

Accurate revenue forecasting is not a nice-to-have. It protects your business.

Your planning board should not only answer: “Who is doing what?”

It should answer: “How much are we going to make?”

ResourcePlanner’s expected revenue forecast feature gives you a clear view of where your business is heading. It helps align staffing with demand, manage cash flow, avoid unrealistic expectations, and maximize profitability.