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Why aren’t my historical figures perfectly accurate?

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When you first join BeanBox you might notice that the historical figures that we have calculated for your repeating income aren’t quite accurate.  You’ll see this in your “This Financial Year” figures if you’re part-way through a financial year.

This is due to the way Xero saves repeating invoice data when an invoice gets adjusted.

Forecasting History and Future

When you add your organisation to BeanBox, we use your repeating invoices to forecast both your recurring future income and historical income. We look at when the invoice was first created, and then calculate forward from there, for every time the invoice occurs (both in the past and the future).

If you haven’t edited the repeating invoice since you set it up, then our calculations will be completely accurate. However if you’ve edited the invoice  – for example, you may have changed the price, or added another line, or changed the next invoice date – whenever these edits are made, Xero changes the “created date” on that repeating invoice to be the date you made the change.  This means any invoices you edited before connecting to BeanBox for the first time will only have “history” calculated from the last time you edited the invoice.

However the good news is that the forward projection for the next 36 months is always accurate.  And the only “history” that is affected are the invoices that were edited before you connected to BeanBox.  After you first connect to BeanBox we then keep accurate data from that day forward – because we no longer need to guess what happened.

This means you can change your repeating invoices as often as you like, and our reports for your previous months and future months will remain accurate.

Whenever you add a new repeating invoice, or edit an existing one, we recalculate your next 36 months of income.

“Previous Months” becomes more accurate

The longer you are connected to BeanBox, the more accurate the data shown for “previous months” becomes.

For example, when you join BeanBox we forecast your previous months.  But when you’ve been connected to BeanBox for 10 months, we’ll have 10 months of accurate “history” plus the forecast of the previous history, and forward facing forecast of the next 36 months.

If you’ve been connected to BeanBox from the start of your financial year, your “This Financial Year” figures will be completely accurate.

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