Edit and fine-tune

Click Edit Budget on the confirmation, or open Budget → Edit Budget.

Choosing, creating and tidying scenarios

Where scenarios are switched on, a Scenario selector sits beside the year. Each budget in it is tagged Active or Draft, and it opens on the Active one. The buttons beside it act on whichever scenario is selected:

Finding the rows to edit

• Pick the year, then narrow with the Sales Rep, Customer and Product filters, or press Load entire budget. Loading a slice keeps large budgets responsive — until you choose, the grid prompts "Choose a filter to load a slice, or Load entire budget."
• Switch Measure between Revenue, Cost and Units.
• Type over any monthly cell.

Detail view for one sales rep, with a monthly cell open for editing.

Two behaviours make editing safe:

• Pro-rata trio — change a cell's revenue and its matching cost and units scale with it, so margins stay coherent.
• Lock row totals / Lock column totals — with these ticked, an edit is redistributed across the other months (or other reps) to hold the total steady. This reshapes how the budget is spread without moving the bottom line.

Columns sort, labels and totals stay frozen as you scroll, and Export to Excel is available at any point. Revert restores the last saved version; Commit budget changes saves. Only cells you actually changed are sent — if there are none you are told "No changes to commit." — and navigating away with unsaved edits prompts first.

Editing by totals instead of line by line

A budget built at rep × customer × product grain can run to thousands of rows, and raising one salesman's year by 5% a row at a time is not realistic. The View dropdown rolls the loaded rows up to a single line per group:

Only the dimensions your budget actually carries are offered — the others are greyed out. A budget built without a product split has nothing to roll up By Product, so the option is not selectable.

1 The View list, set to Totals per Customer. Note the total locks greyed out beside it.

Type a new figure over any monthly total and every budget line behind it is rescaled pro-rata, each keeping its share of the group. Cost and units move with the revenue exactly as they do on a single cell, so margins hold. A rounding pass puts any leftover cents on the largest contributor, so the group sums to precisely the number you typed rather than a cent away from it.

Two details worth knowing before you start typing:

• The Total column is a read-out, not an entry box. It sits frozen beside the labels, it sorts (click the heading to rank reps by size), but the year is shaped by editing the months. To lift a whole year by 5%, raise each month by 5% — or use a what-if at Create Budget, which is what that screen is for.
• A group sitting at zero splits evenly. Pro-rata needs existing shares to work from; where a month's group total is zero there are none, so the figure you type is divided equally across the rows behind it. Only the measure you are editing is set — cost and units cannot be inferred from a zero base, so set those explicitly if the month matters.

Adding, correcting, removing and combining rows

Some changes are about which rows exist rather than their values: a new rep, customer or product the history knows nothing about, a code that matches nothing in your data, a rep who has left, or the same group entered twice under different spellings — Mitre10 and Mitre 10, or a name with a stray trailing space. All are handled from a totals view (By Sales Rep, By Customer or By Product); in Detail the grid tells you to switch.

Tick the box beside a row, then use the buttons above the grid:

Adding a new customer, product or sales rep

A newcomer has no sales history, so Create Budget has nothing to base it on. Instead you add it as a copy of the existing one it most resembles: a new rep taking over part of a territory, a new store like an existing one, a product replacing an old line.

1. Pick the closest match. Switch to the totals view for the kind of row you are adding — By Sales Rep for a new rep — tick the row most like the newcomer and click Add similar.

2. Give it a code. Enter the Code for the new row. If the real code does not exist in your accounting system yet, use a placeholder such as NEW:Acme and correct it later with Change code. A code already in this budget is refused — use Change code to combine rows instead.

3. Set its size. Either as a percentage of the original — a new rep expected to sell half as much as an existing one is 50% — or as the total you want the newcomer to have. Then click Add to budget.

The new row inherits the original's monthly pattern and its mix of customers or products, scaled to the size you chose, so it behaves like a real budget line from the start. The original is left untouched: the budget total grows by the new row. If the newcomer is meant to take budget from the original rather than add to it, lower the original's months afterwards.

Giving a row its correct code

A budget can hold a customer, product or rep whose code matches nothing in your data — a placeholder from Add similar, a newcomer not yet imported, or a code that has since changed. Those rows carry a no match badge, and no actual sales can be compared with them until the code is right. Tick Unmatched codes only to list just those rows; the count beside it tells you how many there are.

To fix one, click its no match badge in Detail, or tick the row in a totals view and choose Change code. Search by part of a code or name — codes already in the budget are marked already budgeted — or type a code that has not been imported yet and use it as entered.

A name that begins or ends with a space is flagged with a ␣ badge, because otherwise it looks identical to the clean version on screen — which is usually how the duplicate went unnoticed in the first place.