Once the AI features are activated on your account, you will find a comparison period "Daily AI forecast" from your list of comparisons, when creating or modifying a report. If the comparison is not visible, check your list of comparisons from the settings.
Things to note about the AI forecast:
It will take the forecasting algorithm a few weeks to optimize itself. So if your forecast has been very recently activated, give it a bit of time to adjust to see the best results.
The best results are seen on the most general level, eg sales per week per whole company or sales per month per store.
The more specific forecasts you are looking at, the less accurate the results will get (eg. daily forecast per product per store).
The accuracy level of the forecast is currently on average +-3% difference to actuals on a week/company level, and we are constantly beating the previous year corresponding period figures both in terms of total accuracy but also in terms of range of variation. As can be seen the case current vs last year day-to day difference on a company level varies up to 76,4%, where as the variance between the forecast vs actuals is only up to 16,5%. We see similar results accross our pilot customers.
Please do not hesitate to point out great variances to us (support@zoined.com)! We optimize the algorithm contantly, and all feedback will help us improve.
Only certain metrics and groupings are currently forecasted:
Metrics:
Sales € (or other currency) with and without tax
Units sold
Number of transactions
Average transaction value
Average transaction size
Groupings:
Store/restaurant
Category
Subcategory
Product
Daypart
There are different timelevels of the AI forecast (Monthly, weekly, daily, hourly). Use the one that is least granular (the largest time level) version which is applicable to the particular report and you will get the best results.
Eg. If you are looking at MTD or WTD report, use the daily forecast, not the hourly one, or if your report is regarding last week sales, use the weekly one.
Currently the sales are forecasted for the next three weeks. The forecasts are generated each day, so tomorrow the forecasts for next week can be slightly different than today.
Currently forecasts take into consideration seasonal shifts in your sales, based on your historical sales data.
Coming up: Forecasts will be adjusted based on your Google business opening hours, if you have input your Google business URL for each location. in your organisation data (can be done via data management).
Local business holiday effect on forecasts is also in our development pipeline.