Forecasts help you to estimate, based on current trends and upcoming financial activity, how much money you can expect to have in your accounts a little further down the road. iBank allows you to create and save forecasts for one or more accounts at a time.
Each forecast you create is saved and displayed under the "Forecasts" item in the "Manage" section of the source list:
Click the small disclosure triangle next to "Forecasts" to reveal your saved forecasts. If you don't see the "Forecasts" item in your source list at all, you probably haven't created any forecasts yet!
Click "Forecasts" in the source list. Summary information about all of your saved forecasts will be displayed to the right:
Click the Forecast button on the toolbar, or choose Manage>Add New Forecast. A blank forecast item will appear in the source list; type in a name for the new forecast.
Select it in the source list, then press the 'Delete' key on your keyboard or choose Edit>Delete. iBank will ask for confirmation before deleting the forecast.
To change the forecast's name, double-click it in the source list. Click once to select a forecast and view its configuration settings in the middle of the main window:
Any changes made to the forecast settings will update the forecast automatically. Because forecasts are generated on-the-fly, you don't need to wait to see your changes take effect.
Start by choosing which accounts you want to include in the forecast. Click the button to add a blank account item to the list. Click in the "Account" column to show a pop-up menu from which you can choose the account you want to include. To remove an account from the list, select it and click the
button.
Next to each account name is the average change and forecasted balance - each of which is calculated using the options below. At the bottom of the list is the total forecasted balance, which represents the sum of all the accounts' forecasted balances.
As with any table in iBank, you can click any of the column headers to sort the list according to the values in that column. Click twice to reverse the direction of the sort. To resize the columns, click and drag the dividers between column headers. Columns can be repositioned by clicking and dragging the column headers.
Set the following options to determine how the forecast is calculated and displayed.
Once you have added an account to your forecast and configured the various options, you will see a line graph drawn in the right side of the main window:
The lines show how your account balances are expected to change from the present to the date and time specified. Time is plotted on the horizontal axis; amounts are plotted on the vertical axis.
The account name for the selected line is displayed at the top of the forecast chart:
Each account you add to the forecast will be represented by its own line on the graph. Each point on a line represents the predicted account balance at the interval you specified. Selecting a shorter interval will result in more points appearing on the graph and possibly more accurate forecasts. Click any point on the graph to view figures for all data points on that line: