# Create forecasts in Amazon Connect
<a name="create-forecasts"></a>

Forecasts are a projection of the workload in your contact center. Amazon Connect provides long-term and short-term forecasts for you to generate capacity plans and agent schedules. The forecasts include inbound, transfer, and callback contacts in both voice and chat channels.

After creating a forecast, you do not need to generate it manually.
+ Long-term forecasts are generated for 64 weeks and automatically updated weekly.
+ Short-term forecasts are generated for 18 weeks and automatically updated daily.
+ Every forecast is computed using the most current contact data.
+ The models for short-term and long-term forecasts are retrained on a weekly and monthly basis, respectively, to incorporate the latest contact patterns.
+ You can delete forecasts. However, downstream capacity plans and schedules created based on the forecasts are impacted.

**To create a forecast**

1. Before creating a forecast, you must create at least one forecast group. If you haven't done that, see [Create forecast groups](create-forecast-groups.md). We strongly recommend creating all of your forecast groups before creating any forecasts.

1. Log in to the Amazon Connect admin website with an account that has security profile permissions for **Analytics**, **Forecasting - Edit**. 

   For more information, see [Assign permissions](required-optimization-permissions.md). 

1. On the Amazon Connect navigation menu, select **Analytics and optimization**, **Forecasting**.

1. Select the **Forecast** tab, and then choose **Create Forecast**.

1. On the **Create Forecast** page, choose the forecast groups.  
![\[The Create forecast page, the Forecast groups dropdown menu.\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/wfm-forecasting-create-forecast.png)

1. Choose the forecast type. Amazon Connect creates a forecast for each type you select.
   + **Long-term** forecasts are used for capacity planning. For example, how many Full Time Equivalent (FTE) agents you need to hire in the next few months, quarter, and year.
   + **Short-term** forecasts are used for scheduling agents and interval level agent headcount estimation. 

1. Choose **Save**. If the forecast group has already been included in a forecast, an error message is displayed. 

1. If the forecast was created successfully, it's Status = **Scheduled**. 

    The status is **Complete** when the computation finishes. You can use **Search** to find forecasts by forecast group name.

1. Amazon Connect creates a forecast for each forecast type, as shown in the following image.  
![\[A list of forecasts, short-term and long-term.\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/wfm-forecasting-types.png)