Model the future with drivers, scenarios and rollups
Once a budget has a plan and real actuals, the tabs across the top turn it into a planning tool. Here's what each one is for. ## Drivers and formulas A **driver** is a quantity your plan depends on — employees, square feet, licences, customers. Manage them from **Drivers** in the toolbar (or on the Budgets list). A driver's value can be: - **Manual** — a starting value plus a fixed or percentage increment per period. - **From records** — a count, sum or average over your records, so the driver moves as the business does. Drivers marked as whole numbers only are adjusted in units rather than percentages, because 10.4 employees isn't a thing. Once a driver exists, a budget line can be planned by **formula** instead of typed figures — for example `employees × 450` for software licences. Change the driver and every line built on it moves. Formulas accept numbers, driver variables, brackets and `+ − × ÷`. If a driver is deleted while formulas still reference it, budget health flags the affected lines and gives you a **Drivers** button to reconnect them. ## Reforecast — where the year actually lands The **Reforecast** tab answers "given how we've done so far, where do we end up?" Closed periods are replaced with real actuals (for lines that track them), while the current and future periods keep the plan. The result is a live outturn for the whole range, compared against budget, with the lines driving the gap listed out. ## Goalseek — how to hit a target **Goalseek** works the other way round. Pick a target metric, type the number you want, then move sliders to see how to get there: - **Line levers** — a percentage change to a plain line's planned total. - **Driver levers** — a percentage change to a driver, which moves every formula line built on it. Totals shown are across the whole budget range. When you find a combination worth keeping, save it as a scenario. ## Sensitivity — which levers matter **Sensitivity** swings every driver and line by the same percentage in both directions and measures the effect on your chosen metric, ranked biggest first. The longest bars are where the number is most at stake — the levers worth managing closely, and the assumptions worth double-checking. ## Scenarios — compare the what-ifs **Scenarios** is the read-out for everything you saved in Goalseek: each scenario's revenue, total cost and operating profit, and the swing against the current plan. Build and edit them in Goalseek; compare them here. ## Costing and Movement - **Costing** re-cuts the same figures through four lenses — absorption, marginal, structure and activity-based — so you can look at contribution and cost structure without rebuilding the budget. - **Movement** plots the per-period story: income against expenses, the direct/indirect and fixed/variable splits, contribution and operating profit. ## Trend — actuals over time **Trend** charts actual against plan using daily snapshots. Snapshots are only captured for budgets **pinned to the dashboard**, so pin a budget as soon as you want history from it — the chart builds up from the day you pin, not retrospectively. Admins can capture one immediately with **Run snapshot now**. ## Master budgets — one consolidated view A **master budget** combines several functional budgets into a single rollup. Create one with **New master budget**, then choose its members. Two rules govern which budgets can be combined: - **Periods must be compatible.** A coarser member can't be split into a finer master period — quarterly members can't feed a monthly master. Either change the master's cadence or drop the member. - **Units must match to appear in the headline.** Members are grouped by unit, so a GBP budget and a headcount budget can sit in the same master, but the headline figure and trend follow one unit. Budget health warns you if no member matches the headline unit. ## Importing a plan from a spreadsheet If your numbers already live in a spreadsheet, use **Import plan** in the toolbar. The file needs: - a **Line** column with the budget line names, and - one column per period named after that period's plan column, e.g. `Jul 2026 plan` — exactly as **Export CSV** produces them. An optional **Category** column groups new lines. Actuals and variance columns are ignored — the import only ever touches planned figures. You'll get a preview showing which rows update an existing line, which create a new one and which are skipped, plus a count of the values that will change, before anything is applied. Choose: - **Merge** — update only the cells present in the file, leaving everything else alone. - **Replace periods** — clear the periods covered by the file first, so the CSV becomes the truth for that range. Nothing is written until you confirm, so it's safe to import a file just to see what it would do.