What if?
It is usually important, if not critical, to make one or more alternative forecasts to see what happens in a worst-case scenario (what if the economy enters recession? what if your competitors try to blow you out of the water?) and a best-case scenario (what if sales go through the roof?). At least having done the analysis and built the spreadsheet, there is not too much work involved in producing the alternative scenarios. The easiest way to do this is by making a duplicate of your spreadsheet and keying in some new numbers in the trend and/or one-off columns.
Among statisticians and beanies, what-if analysis is known by the mystical name of sensitivity analysis. This makes more sense if you think of it in terms of: ‘what if interest ...
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