Broken Bat - Discussion Forum: I used profit lost forecasting to up the income of my broken bat franchise. Up yours!

Forum >> Discussions >> I used profit lost forecasting to up the income of my broken bat franchise. Up yours!

Post ID	Date & Time	Game Date

#81307	04/22/2021 8:19:45 pm	Feb 19th, 2050
Ken_Kennilworth Joined: 11/26/2019 Posts: 400 Charleston Hawks II.1	Thanks to the many experienced players here for all the help they've been in helping me learn this game. While I can never thank them enough I can do as they did by sharing knowledge with other new players...and in that way help build this game we all play. What follows is something i haven't seen covered in forum discussions. Hope this helps someone. I've been playing broken bat for 5 seasons now and after a poor first couple of seasons, had some success both on field and profit-wise. Making up a season financial forecast/budget has enriched the game for me. Indeed, when I don't achieve the on-field goal of winning the division or avoiding relegation, there is always the ancillary goal of profit to aim for. I've profited the last 3 successive seasons and rebuilt my war chest to 10 million more that it was when I started play. Like any business a financial projection is the operating plan translated into dollars of revenue and expense. For Broken Bat having a good financial projection helps one balance winning games against profit making, decide early if one can afford to buy extra players to contend seriously for the title, or cut expenses and start building for next year. A complication to Broken Bat finances is variable revenue flows with comparatively fixed expenses. Revenues are mostly dependent on ticket sales and those routinely vary due to update periods with as few as 5 home games all the way up to 15. Broken Bat has a nice profit loss report for review past performance financially. But because revenues and net income varies significantly update to update, the profit loss is somewhat lacking for managing a franchise's finances. However, that profit loss is a good framework to build into a forecast model. Your forecast can be a simple or complex as you choose. I use what I think is rather complicated for Broken Bat in that I forecast for each update period through to the end of the year. I use a spreadsheet and construct a forecast profit/loss statement patterned after the actual one in Broken Bat. Ticket sales is the key to the forecast. This is the toughest part of this whole project. I start by downloading my schedule to a spreadsheet and then counting out each of the three types of the revenue earning dates (Spring, Cup/Playoff, and Regular season) that are in each update period. Once I have the number of each type by update period, I estimate average attendance/revenue for that earning type. I look at the league's prior season attendance figures/averages for the middle finishing teams to settle on an estimate. (Note—for cup I assume the minimum number of games, 20, and for playoffs none...but I hope like mad we play well enough that we have more than that.) Then, it's just a matter of multiplying by dollars per ticket to arrive at revenues per date. The rest of the forecast is relatively simple because the amounts for each line item are fixed or vary little from one update to the next. So I fill in the data manually and voila, the forecast model is constructed. Then it is playtime, when I “what-if” fine tune the attendance forecast and salary figures do get profit/loss to an acceptable level. During the season, I replace the forecast attendance and expense for each date as actual amounts are earned/incurred, and revise the remaining forecast amounts as per experience. If all is going well I make more profit in update periods I have forecast making money, and lose less when losses are expected. And if not, then I start planing to make changes. Updated Thursday, April 22 2021 @ 8:39:22 pm PDT

#81315	04/23/2021 4:29:18 am	Feb 19th, 2050
g10rsh Joined: 02/05/2016 Posts: 170 Champaign Suzumebachi VI.2	Thanks for sharing! It can be easy to forget about the financial side, but if you want to make it to legends and stay there it definitely helps to have a big bankroll.

#81362	04/23/2021 4:55:42 pm	Feb 19th, 2050
JV-Tosshin Joined: 11/11/2020 Posts: 297 Biloxi Thresher Sharks V.15	Underrated protip for making a lot of money while still fielding a competitive team: Be in LL6. Heading into my 3rd season now. I took over my team in the end of 2047. They had 5 mil in the vault, and had been at -5 in the start of 2047. Now, heading into 2050, I've gotten it up to 24,5 mil. Very proud, especially since I've managed to make the team able to be in the mix for promotion. I absolutely agree that balancing the books is both a necessity and quite the interesting exercise. My wages have gone up 7 million over the winter. Gonna be interesting to see if I can maintain the profit!