Forecasting
Plan next year against real billing data, not a stale spreadsheet
Every forecast is wrong. A forecast wired to live billing data is at least wrong in a way you can see happening.
What is Forecasting?
The starting point
Your assumptions, your real baseline
The fastest useful forecast starts from where you actually are. Bastle pre-fills starting MRR, customer count, growth and churn from your own history, then lets you change any of them and choose whether growth compounds or is added linearly. The output is a plain sentence and a curve rather than a wall of cells.
- Starting MRR, growth rate and revenue churn pre-filled from your data
- Linear or exponential growth, so you can model both stories
- Customer forecast alongside revenue, using your own user churn
12-month MRR forecast
3 scenarios
- Conservative
- $214k
- Base
- $268k
- Aggressive
- $310k
Scenarios
Three futures on one chart
One forecast is a guess. Three named scenarios compared side by side is a conversation about risk. Build a base case, a conservative case and whatever your investors keep asking about, then compare them over a custom range to see where the paths separate and what would have to be true for each one.
- Named scenarios compared on the same axes over any date range
- Revenue, profit and bank balance projected per scenario
- Runway in days, burn rate and net profit margin
This is the real product running on sample data. Click to use it.
The model
Costs, headcount and the plan versus what happened
Revenue is only half a forecast. Model fixed and variable expenses, plan hiring with the payroll costs that come with it, and track a full profit-and-loss view. Then compare the plan against actuals — both forecast variance and budget variance per account — so a drift gets noticed in month two rather than at the year-end review.
- Operating model with a P&L view, fixed and variable expenses
- Hiring plans including payroll taxes, benefits and start-date timing
- Forecast and budget variance per financial account, month by month
MRR
+5.2%$162,400
Net revenue churn
−0.3pp2.1%
Active customers
+381,284
ARPU
+1.4%$126.48
Actuals
Numbers that update themselves
A forecast stops being useful the moment it stops being maintained, which is what happens to every spreadsheet eventually. Subscription actuals come from your billing data automatically, and accounting actuals sync from QuickBooks Online or Xero, so the variance you are looking at is current rather than a snapshot from whenever someone last had time.
- Subscription actuals from the same engine that produces your metrics
- QuickBooks Online and Xero connectors for accounting actuals
- Recurring invoices from your accounting system treated as subscriptions
Why did MRR drop last month?
MRR fell $4,180 (−3.1%) in March. Almost all of it is contraction, not cancellations: 31 Scale customers downgraded to Growth after the annual renewal window opened.
Status
What beta means here
Forecasting is in beta and labelled that way everywhere it appears. The projections, scenarios and variance reporting all work and run against your real data, but the modelling is under active change and we would rather you treat it as a strong second opinion than as the only input to a hiring decision. Everything else on this page ships today at full confidence.
- Available now, on real data, with no separate charge
- Model behaviour and defaults may change between releases
- Tell us where it breaks and it gets fixed quickly — that is what beta is for
Churn definition
Editable- Delinquency window
- 21 days
- Trials counted
- Never
- Refunds
- Deducted in period
- Downgrades
- Contraction, not churn
Change any rule and every historical figure recalculates against it.
Capabilities
What Forecasting includes
All of it sits in the same workspace. Bastle is free while in beta, so nothing on this list is an add-on, an upgrade or a separate subscription.
Annual plans handled correctly
Lump-sum annual billing is normalised for the revenue forecast and kept intact for the cash forecast, because those are genuinely different questions.
Runway you can act on
Runway in days against each scenario, so the difference between a hiring plan and a hiring freeze is visible before you commit to either.
Segment-level forecasts
Forecast a saved segment rather than the whole business, which is where a blended growth rate usually hides the interesting part.
No spreadsheet export required
The model lives next to the actuals, so nobody has to re-key last month's numbers into a workbook to refresh it.
Related
Where this connects
Forecasting reads the same normalised billing history as the rest of Bastle, so a change in one place shows up in the others without an export.
Metrics
Most analytics tools hand you a number and ask you to trust it.
Learn moreSegmentation
A single company-wide churn rate is an average of several different businesses.
Learn moreBenchmarks
A 4% monthly churn rate is a catastrophe for one business and unremarkable for another.
Learn moreAsk
A dashboard makes you assemble the answer yourself.
Learn moreKeep going: see everything Bastle does, look up the maths behind any number in the metric glossary, or run a figure through the free calculators.
Practical questions are usually answered by the connector list, an honest comparison with the alternatives, or the same product framed for founders and for finance teams.
Frequently asked questions
Is forecasting available now?
What forecasting method does Bastle use?
How accurate is a subscription revenue forecast?
Do I need to connect an accounting system?
Can I forecast a single segment or plan?
See your own numbers in about two minutes.
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