In the first part of this chapter, we will focus on how to perform some of the typical business analyses such as forecasting, allocating values, and calculating the number of days from the last sale date.

To forecast future business, we frequently use linear regression to calculate the trend line, which can tell us how the business will likely be doing in the future, if everything continues in the same direction. Many businesses have a cyclic behavior, and the cycle period can be a year, a month, a week, and so on. If we can calculate the values for the next cycle using the trend line from a previous cycle, we will have a better approximation of the future results than we would be able to get from simply using a linear trend. We will learn how to do forecasting using both linear regression and periodic cycles.

Businesses can have unallocated expenses, such as operating expenses that are charged to corporates, but not allocated to individual departments. The key to allocating these...