Fiscal Year Monthly Forecast

[Decal]

Hello, I think I've read every article out there about this, but I can't seem to find my answer.  

Here's my setup.  I have a Summary table that has all of my voluntary terminatinos to date.  It runs on a fiscal calendar from 2021-01 (November of 2020) to current 2024-03 (January of 2024).  

Fiscal Year Mo	Monthly Voluntary Terms	Fiscal Date Conversion
2021-01	25	11/1/2020
2021-02	25	12/1/2020
2021-03	11	1/1/2021

My normal calendar/date table only goes out to today (for reasons I won't go into here), so I created a separate Forecast Date table.  That table has every date from 11/1/2020 to 10/31/2026.  

Date	FiscalMo	FiscalYear	Fiscal YrMo	YearMonthKey	FiscalQtr	Fiscal YrMo#	FiscalQtr#
10/31/2026	12	2026	202612	202612	Q4	202612	4

I created a Hierarchy using Fiscal Year, FiscalQtr#, FiscalMo, Date.

The Date in the Forecast Date Table has an active relationship with the date in the Summary table and it maps the data just fine.  Using a line chart.  I use the Hierarchy as the X-axis and my Monthly Voluntary Terms as my measure.  

Here is where I run into my problem.

When I go to the Analytics part of the line chart, I don't have a forecast option at any level except Fiscal Year.  And that won't allow me to use Years as the Units (only points).  

My ideal output would show the remaining months of Fiscal Year 2024 as this is intended to assess if we are on track for our FY24 goal.  

Any help is greatly, greatly appreciated

[Greg_Deckler]

@Decal This sounds about right. The forecast feature is extremely inconsistent when using your own hierarchy versus the "Date Hierarchy" of a date column with Auto TI turned on. In the later case, you have forecasting available at all levels and Units can be Years, Months, Days, Hours, Minutes as well as Points. But for your own hierarchy, not so much. Why is that? Who really knows.

[Tom-Garvin-2023]

My Daily Duhh? What is "Auto TI". If T = Time and I = Intelligence, I still do not understand the phrase as used here.

...a date column with Auto TI turned on..."

@Greg 

[Greg_Deckler]

@Decal @Tom-Garvin-2023 I have a video coming up on my YouTube channel MicrosoftHatesGreg that explains this. And no, it is not because your don't have enough points or that it is inconsistent. It's just yet more Power BI weirdness.

[Tom-Garvin-2023]

@Greg_Deckler - I see you anticipated my next question(s) and the new video makes everything clear to me (more or less). Embracing Auto Date/Time contradicts 99.99% of recommendations found elsewhere, but I've broken a few rules and disputed conventional wisdom on "best practices". I have my doubts about the value of Power BI Forecasts for anything serious that is not reasonably stable and a predictable schedule, you know, like retail sales with obvious seasonal trends. Otherwise, just extrapolating from past behavior is very close to Correlation = Causation. It works until other factors intervene. This is why my focus is now on AutoML Feature Engineering and Key Influencer analysis.

[Decal]

There is a setting in Option for Auto Time-Intelligence.  You can set this globally or on this particular file.  I turned it off and reloaded and turned it on and reloaded.  Nothing solved this.  The only thing I could located is that I did get an error that I didn't have consistent enough data (probably too small of a dataset) to run the forecast.  It's possible that's the issue.