The short-term business forecasting: an analysis of a firm's sales budgeting process

Abstract

A firm's capacity to predict the changes in future sales and other short-term items are of interest to economists both for macro- and micro-economic planning. When firms, in the aggregate, fail to provide fairly accurate predictions of the level, or at least the direction, in these quantities then anticipations surveys, providing series for predicting the behaviour of the economy are likely to be misleading. At the micro level, if individual firms cannot predict sales, and others cast doubt on theoretical calculations of firm and market performance which underestimates uncertainty. Little attention has been given to measuring the accuracy of individual company forecasts.