The auditable forecast brief

A forecast you cannot interrogate is just a rumour with a decimal point. The last step is not another number; it is the brief that lets you take a number into a meeting and defend it. That is what makes it auditable: you can see how the figure was reached, and change it, not just read what it is.

What the brief contains

Every forecast arrives as an auditable brief with three things laid out together:

• the expected value,
• its 80% interval, and
• the demand drivers behind it.

Nothing is hidden in a weighting you cannot see. For the illustrative Singel example used throughout these guides, the brief reads €1.20M a year, an interval of €1.0M to €1.4M, and the drivers that produced it: Public & local at 100, Work & school at 96, Shopping & dining at 92. The number and its reasons sit on the same page.

Question every driver

Because the drivers are visible, you can argue with them. If Work & school is carrying the forecast, you can ask whether those offices are stable, or whether a tenant is about to leave. If the number leans on tourism, you can weigh how exposed that makes it. This is the point of an auditable forecast: the forecast becomes a conversation about real, named factors rather than a verdict handed down by a model you have to take on trust.

Re-run when the plan changes

Plans change. The unit next door comes up, the format shifts from 200 to 300 square metres, the opening slips two quarters. You do not have to accept a stale forecast. Change the inputs and re-run, and the value, the interval, and the drivers move with the new reality. The brief stays current with the decision instead of freezing at the moment it was first pulled.

Pull the figures into your own stack

The same brief is available through the REST API and MCP server, so the value, interval, and drivers land directly in your own systems, your investment models, your dashboards, your approval workflow, in the format your team already works in. The forecast does not live in a tool your analysts have to visit; it comes to them. Nothing is manually retyped, so nothing is quietly transcribed wrong on the way to the board pack.

The number that survives the room

All of this is in service of one moment: the room where the capital gets committed. A confident point estimate with no workings behind it wilts under a hard question. A brief you can open, whose interval is honest and whose drivers are named, holds up. And it keeps improving: once a site opens, its real revenue feeds back into calibration, so every forecast sharpens the next. That is the continuous-learning loop closing.

A number you can defend beats a number you have to trust blindly. That is the difference between a forecast and a guess with good production values.