Financial forecast

A financial forecast is an estimate of future financial outcomes for a company (or country) - for futures and current markets. Typically, using historical internal accounting and sales data, in addition to external market and economic indicators, a financial forecast will be the analyst's modelled guess of company outcomes in financial terms over a given time period — which is usually one year. Arguably, the key aspect of preparing a financial forecast is predicting revenue; future costs, fixed and variable, can be estimated as a function of sales via "common-sized analysis" - where relationships are derived from historical accounting data. See Financial modeling #Accounting generally; and for the components / steps of business modeling here, see the list for "Equity valuation" under Outline of finance #Discounted cash flow valuation.