Hey everyone!
We are in the process of creating our budget for 2022, and I think we found a pretty cool workaround for an issue that came up. Figured I would share it in case somebody else is looking to do the same…
Our goal was to create a monthly budget for Jan 2022-Dec 2022 based on historic Actuals. However, since November and December of 2021 hadn’t happened yet (at the time we were creating it), those 2 months would have filled in with 0’s. That would have created an issue when using the Spread function based on actuals, or if increasing by a % across actuals.
We decided to create 2 budgets, then publish them to the same Stream on Financial Statements. So, we created 1 budget for Jan-Sep 2022 based on actuals from Jan-Sep 2021 (offset -12). We then created a budget for Oct-Dec 2022 based on actuals from Oct-Dec 2020 (offset -24). The issue here was that we were having to work between 2 budget worksheets, and spreads were difficult to work with since we had to pre-divide all our numbers (75% into budget worksheet 1, 25% into budget worksheet 2).
Then an epiphany happened today! Since we had Published both budget worksheets into a single Stream on Financial Statements called “2022 Budget” that combined the 2 worksheets and accounted for Jan-Dec 2022, I realized that we could create a new budget worksheet based on those numbers. So we created a new budget, called it “Budget 2022,” made it for Jan-Dec 2022, and based it on actuals from “2022 Budget” with an offset of 0. This pulled all the numbers from the “2022 Budget” Stream into our new budget workbook, which meant we had 12 month’s worth of actuals to work off of while being able to use the Spread function properly!
Hope this helps!
Tim