Budget Report — budget against actuals
Open Budget Report from the main menu.
- Budget year — which budget to track against.
- View by — Sales Rep, Customer, Product, or any of your category dimensions. One budget, many lenses; no rebuilding required.
- Show — six measures. Variance (actual minus budget, colour-coded so shortfalls stand out), Budget (the plan), Actual, and three that read the margin rate rather than the amounts: Margin % (Actual), Margin % (Budget) and Margin % Variance — the gap between those two in percentage points, colour-coded the same way.
- YTD only — appears on the two variance measures. It drops months that have not been traded yet; without it a future month shows its whole budget as a shortfall and every row reads as behind plan.
Double-click a group row to show the items inside it, then step back with the return control. Headers and totals stay pinned while you scroll. Use Export to Excel to share, or Save to Favourites to pin this exact year, view and measure for one-click return next month.
On the three margin measures, a row, column or grand total is the overall rate for everything it covers — total margin over total revenue — so it lands somewhere inside the range of the cells rather than above them. A customer ten times the size moves it ten times as much. A cell with no revenue behind it shows a dash rather than 0%.
Reporting on a draft, and adopting it
Where the year holds more than one budget, a second row of controls appears beneath the first:
- Scenario — which budget to report on. It opens on the Active one, the budget of record, so the default view is always the real plan.
- Compare with — pick a second budget and the grid gains a column for it, alongside the difference between the two. Useful for reading a draft against the live plan on the same page, month by month.
- Adopt — appears once you are looking at the Active budget with a draft selected as the comparison. It copies the draft's figures over the Active budget, after a confirmation that names both. The comparison is then cleared, because the two now hold the same numbers.
Adopting replaces the figures in the Active budget rather than promoting the draft to take its place. Everything already pointing at the Active budget — saved favourites, dashboard widgets, the Budget Progress screen — carries on working and simply shows the new numbers. The draft is left as it was, so there is still a record of what was adopted.
The budget is stored at sales rep and category grain, so the same plan can be read by rep this week and by region next week, switching measures as you go, without touching the underlying numbers.