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Getting started with Desktop Sales Forecasting

Install

1. Install Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting through the regular Windows installer.
2. Get a Lokad account (unless you already have one).
3. Update the settings of Lokad Desktop (a).

(a) More details provided in the following section.

As you can see the install does not require to actually change anything to your current application. Furthermore, Lokad Desktop will not make any change to your database neither during the install, nor afterwards while executing the application.

Updating the settings

There are 3 sections for the Lokad Desktop settings (see the screenshots)

1. the Lokad connection that indicates which Lokad account should be used (user name / password).
2. the Forecasting task that defines the type of forecast that is requested (ex: weekly or monthly forecasts).
3. the Business application that indicates how to connect to your accounting/commerce application to retrieve your sales data.

In order to update those settings, launch the Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting application and select the select the Settings tab.

1. Lokad connection

• User name: The Lokad user name is the e-mail address that you have provided when creating your Lokad account.
• Password: It's the same password that the one used to access your Lokad account.
• WS URL: Do not change unless you know what you are doing (see the developer guide and the sandbox).

2. Forecasting task

• Period: The period defines the type of forecast to be delivered (ex: daily, weekly or monthly forecasts).
• Past periods: Indicates how many periods should be displayed as sales history in the Report panel.
• Future periods: Indicates how many periods should be displayed as forecasted sales in the Report panel.
• Max tasks: Maximal number of forecasting tasks. Lokad is priced by the forecasting task. Basically, each product in your catalog has its own sales history, and potentially its own forecasting task. Yet, some products may not be worth to be forecasted due to their low sales activities. The max tasks indicates that only the top N most active products will be forecasted; thus, avoiding the merchant to get charged for less than useful forecasts.
• Period start: The date used as a reference to define the period boundaries. The default value is Monday, Jan 1st, 2001. Thus, if you choose weekly forecasts (resp. monthly forecasts), all the periods will start on Mondays (resp. the 1st day of the month). The period start could be changed if you want to adjust the definition of the periods to your business needs.

3. Business application

• Application: Indicates the commerce application where the sales data will be retrieved from. See section below for more details.
• Connection string: The connection string used to connect to your commerce application database. connectionstrings.com is a directory listing the connection string syntaxes for all major database systems.
• Application option: Some commerce applications need additional settings. This field can be left empty.

Supported commerce applications

Uninstall

1. Revert back you subscription plan to Free on your Lokad account.
2. Click on the Uninstall link that has been installed in your Windows Start menu.