Make a substantive response in a minimum of 175 words. Be constructive and professional in your responses.

Forecasting is a business decision that is based on a forecast of the future. Forecasting is important as it helps a business determine which consumer to build a relationship with and work with, which products to produce as well as how much of which product will be needed for inventory, and how many people the business will need to hire to run the business itself.

Steps involved in forecasting include deciding what to forecast sales or demand, evaluate and analyze appropriate data using what data is available to you, select and test the forecasting model forecasting model, generate the forecast, and monitor forecast accuracy.

Qualitative forecasting method is based on an educated guess by a forecaster or expert based on intuition, knowledge, and experience. Otherwise known as the judgmental method.

Quantitative forecasting method is based on mathematical modeling.

The key difference between qualitative and quantitative forecasting is that one is a judgmental method while the other is a mathematical method.

I think depending on what the business is forecasting they are both good. I think this because if a business is looking to sell a new product and need to forecast sales then qualitative would be the best method due to not having previous historical data on the product, whereas if a business is opening another business in a new location they would use the quantitative method by using historical data from one location to the new location to predict future purchases.