Predictive sales analysis

[jilllellis]

Hello fellow excel friends,
I want to see if my thought process seems logical, or if yall have better ways to do this. I have a large data set with financed purchases in my industry. I created a formula to show how many days in between purchases, avg day between purchases, days till last purchase, and based on avg btwn time, possible future day of purchase. This is based on ALL customer financed transactions. I there another way to predict future purchase date based on past sales date?
thanks,
Jill

 

[igold]

History is the best predictor for future behavior, however are there any external factors such as Seasonal or Cyclical. How about things like interest rates or some other predictor such as New Housing Starts. The product you are selling is it durable or consumable. Additionally if you google terms like "Predictive Analytics" or "Predictive Modelling" then we just blew the lid off a big can...

 

[jilllellis]

Yes, I agree, for instance oil prices affect our sales, but statistically speaking the correlation is not significant. Housing starts greatly affect us too.