Forecastr Beta Update – November 2, 2022

Screenshot: Investor access options

Hey gang, Zack here. I’m back with more exciting improvements to the Forecastr Beta! Our team has been busy, and you’re going to love the improvements we’ve been working on!

Here’s a list of the biggest improvements we’ve released over the past few weeks:

Improvements

Calculation Speed Improvements:

We said in our last update that speed was our number one priority and we meant it. We made some major changes to how our app runs calculations and we’ve already seen speed increases of 10-20x or more in some cases. We’re not going to stop there, but hopefully, you’ve noticed that pages load faster, and the Data Table refreshes much faster and less often.

Copy and View Entire Numbers in Forecast and Actuals:

Now, you can copy cells from both your Forecast and your Actuals. You can either use the standard keyboard shortcuts of Command+C/Control+C or you can right-click and click Copy in the pop-up. Even better, when you copy a cell, it copies the entire value and not the truncated value.

Screenshot: Copy cell contents

Hide Metrics in Quarter and Year Views:

On the Assumptions tab, metrics were all summing in both the quarterly and annual views. That didn’t make sense for metrics like conversion rates, benefits %, etc. So we’ve decided to hide metrics in the Quarters and Years views and will unhide them once we’ve built a user-selectable way to choose whether a given metric sums, averages, or is the last value of the period.

Screenshot: Switching between months and quarters

CSV and Excel Export Improvements:

  • The CSV export tool is better coordinated with the timeline selector so that what you see on screen is what you download.
  • The Actuals CSV export has also been updated to be Actuals data until the current month, and then it switches to Forecast data from that month onward.
  • The Excel export has been increased from 5 years from the model start date to 6 years.
Screenshot: CSV export

Investor Access Improvements:

  • Email addresses are no longer required when the Email Required button is disabled.
  • The Expiration Date is once again a date picker instead of a month picker.
  • If an Investor tries to access an expired link, they will be notified on the landing page.
  • Investor Access emails sent from the platform no longer have the super long link at the bottom, so they look nicer and less like spam.
  • We also made some minor UI updates to make Investor Access more consistent with the rest of the app.
Screenshot: Investor access link options
Screenshot: Investor access email example

QuickBooks Integration Improvements:

  • QuickBooks doesn’t ask to reconnect as often. It should only ask every 100 days (instead of daily like it did before).
  • The sticky headers we have for the Data Table on the Assumptions Tab are now working on the Integrations mapping page too.
Screenshot: Quickbooks integration sticky headers

Ad-Blockers Are No Longer Causing Issues:

We use a feature-flagging tool called Optimizely, which is great for testing and roll-outs, but it was fighting with built-in and 3rd party ad-blockers. Not anymore!

Timeline Expansion:

We used to only let users view up to 72 months of their model, and this was largely for performance reasons. With the new performance improvements, you can now select up to 240 months/80 quarters/20 years!

Screenshot: Timeline expansion

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed: The Timeline Selector wouldn’t let some users pick all start dates in the future
  • Fixed: Small decimals not showing fully in the Data Table
  • Fixed: Percentages showing as rounded integers in the Data Table
  • Fixed: Asset Labels showing a generic asset label instead of their actual custom label
  • Fixed: Manually edited cells weren’t showing the entire value when you clicked into the cell
  • Fixed: Percentages inside of the Info pop-up weren’t displaying correctly

That’s it for this release. Stay tuned for future release notes!

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