Opportunities carry three forecast values, not one — commit, likely, and best. The pattern is borrowed from “run toward bad news” forecasting: the cost of one number is that it averages out the disagreement between optimism and reality.
What each band means
- Commit — what you’ll personally back. If you’d be embarrassed to miss this number, that’s your commit.
- Likely — your honest expected outcome. The deal could land here, give or take.
- Best — the ceiling if everything breaks your way. Not aspirational; achievable.
How nulls are treated
A missing band is a signal, not a zero. The forecast page will never coerce an unfilled commit to zero and silently include it in the total — instead it surfaces those rows separately so you have to look at them.
The UI rule
Setting commit, likely, and best all to the same value is a smell (it usually means you didn’t want to think about the range). The UI will warn you before saving in that case, but won’t block — a deal at $0 across all three bands is a legitimate “this is dead” state.
The forecast page rolls up all three bands across open opportunities and shows them as three lines on a bar chart. You can drill into “why is best higher than likely” by clicking the chart.