'Omitted' Forecast Category Help

Question

On the Salesforce Documentation it mentions that the 'Omitted' forecast category

'means the amount does not contribute to your forecast'

1. I would like to know what criteria causes the forecast stage to be set as 'omitted'
2. Why they cannot be shown in the forecast (why doesn't it contribute to it?) It's a forecast so any amount in there can change --- Forecast are only used as a guide for sales people

Any business examples would also help and are welcome

Answer 1

I would say this question is pretty broad and opinion based, but I personally am rather glad that we can exclude Opportunity records from the Forecast module. Our business case is we are trying to forecast based on a custom object. So we need a multi-step process:

1. Generate OpportunityLineItem records which aggregate our order counts into Quantity.
2. Attach these line items to Opportunity records and assign them to the Closed forecast category.
3. Perform some further manipulations on that data to project what quantity should be in the Commit category.
4. And so on.

If we allow our sales users to throw records into the mix that weren't carefully calculated, that would throw off the entire module. If you don't want to omit any stages, then you have the freedom to do that. If someone else has a different use case and wants to omit all stages available to end users, they can also do that. The solution settled on by the Salesforce team offers maximum flexibility.