Use Excel Goal Seek To Meet Your Profit Goal

Say you have a quarterly Profit Statement and your Sales for Q1 and Q2 have been reasonably well but in Q3 they dropped dramatically.  You are left with one quarter to meet your Net Profit goal of $200,000.

You can use Excel´s Goal Seek feature (under What If Analysis) to find out what Sales you need to achieve in Q4 in order to meet your Net Profit goal of $200,000.

Download excel workbookGoal-Seek-Budget-Values.xlsx

STEP 1: Select the cell that you want to achieve your goal of $200,000 which is the Total Net Profit in cell F7, which is a Sum formula (Important: This cell must be a formula for the Goal Seek to work)

STEP 2: Go to Data > What If Analysis > Goal Seek

STEP 3: SET CELL: This is the cell that contains the goal we want to achieve, F7, and is selected automatically

STEP 4: TO VALUE: Type the goal value that you want to achieve.  In our example, it will be 200,000

STEP 5: BY CHANGING CELL: Enter the reference for the cell that contains the input value that you want to adjust.  In our example it is the Q4 Sales forecast in cell E5

STEP 6: Press OK and Goal Seek will run and produce a result.  Press OK to keep the results or Cancel to discard

With Goal Seek we need to achieve Q4 Sales of $437,730 in order to achieve our Net Profit goal of $200,000.  Over to the Sales team then to make it happen!

John Michaloudis

Founder & Chief Inspirational Officer

at

MyExcelOnline.com

John Michaloudis is a former accountant and finance analyst at General Electric, a Microsoft MVP since 2020, an Amazon #1 bestselling author of 4 Microsoft Excel books and teacher of Microsoft Excel & Office over at his flagship MyExcelOnline Academy Online Course.