Case 8-1
As the senior accountant for a manufacturing company, you have many years experience working with Excel and often provide help and tips on using Excel to the company's more junior accountants.
-This morning June, a junior accountant who works in the budgeting area, sends you an e-mail. She is preparing a manufacturing expenses forecast for the next five years based on the data from current year and the previous four years. She asks if Excel has a tool that can help her with forecasting forward five years. In your reply e-mail, you suggest to June that she can ____.
A) ask Lou, in fixed assets accounting, because you have no idea what Excel tool would be useful
B) create a chart based on the five years' available data and then add an appropriate trendline to the chart to predict values beyond the available data
C) create a new worksheet in her workbook, copy the actual data to the new worksheet, and then use slicers to forecast forward five years
D) just increment each year's forecasted expenses by ten percent; that should give forecasted values that will be close enough

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Creating a chart based on the five years' available data and adding an appropriate trendline to the chart is a common and effective method for forecasting future values using Excel. This method allows June to visualize the trend in the data and project it forward five years. Choosing option A is not a helpful response as it does not provide any assistance to June. Option C suggests using slicers which are more commonly used for filtering data than forecasting. Option D is not a reliable method as it assumes that expenses will increase by the same percentage each year.

Case 8-1 As the Senior Accountant for a Manufacturing Company, You Have