Why it's important
Rail companies need to know, at regular intervals, several key things about revenue and demand. First, are they meeting the most recent forecast? Second, are they growing over the previous year? Third, how does the growth compare with other benchmarks in the industry? If any of these are unsatisfactory then other actions such as marketing and cost reduction programmes may be needed.

In addition, it is also often necessary to amend the short term forecasts to take emerging results into account along with other changes such as changes in economic factors, fares increases, allocation changes (especially Travelcard and ORCATS changes) and management actions such as service changes and new products.

How we can help
We can undertake these analysis tasks and suggest further ones, often at short notice. We can either provide advice and training to the incumbent revenue analyst or provide a full period reporting service while a permanent replacement is found. We are experienced in the interrogation and use of the new railway ticket revenue database, LENNON. We can also produce short term income forecasts such as passenger income budgets and outturn changes. We aim to forecast to within 1% of the final actual income for our short term forecasts.

Who we've helped already
We have undertaken a large amount of work in this area, including:

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