Current Year Forecasts

Budgets and Forecasts > Budgets & Forecasts > Current Year Forecast

The following screen will open.  This may take a little time, so please be patient.

The screen will show all nominal account / department combinations where there has been a posting in the current year (Actual) or where a Budget or a Forecast has been entered.

Setting Forecast to Budget

Initially the Forecast will show £0.00 (or possibly a random looking set of data).  To start, it is essential that the Forecast is set to be the same as the Budget.  To do this, click the button in the bottom right corner of the form, ‘Set Forecast to Budget’ and confirm that you want to continue.  (This process can be repeated later if you want to clear all the forecast data and start again - but see Rebuild Forecast below if you have already entered any budget to forecast variations.)

Entering Forecasts

Forecasts are entered as variations from the budget, essentially listing the reason for the variation and an amount.  You can have multiple variations for the same nominal / department budget to forecast movement.

To enter a ‘variation’, highlight the row where the variation from budget is forecast to happen, and click the ‘Budget to Forecast Variation’ button at the foot of the screen.

You can then enter a description and amount.  For example, the screen below shows a description explaining why the Forecast for nominal / department combination for Electricity has increased overall to £8,450 from £8,000.

Note that any number of rows (transactions) may be added, and that income (reduction in costs) is entered as negative.

Exiting this form will return you to the main ‘Maintain Forecast’ form where, in the example below, you can see that the Forecast now shows £8,450 against a Budget of £8,000 for the nominal account 2710, ‘Utilities - Electricity’ and department 48, ‘Premises - Utilities’.

The Budget Monitoring Summary report shows figures by Department; to limit the form to show just those nominal accounts for a particular department, select the department from the drop-down box at the top of the screen.  You can also limit the data to a specific nominal account in the same way.

The screen below shows the data for just department 48, ‘Premises - Utilities’.

The totals for Department 48, ‘Premises - Utilities’ can then be seen reported on the Budget Monitoring Summary, as the extract below demonstrates.

A report showing the reasons for the variation from Budget to Forecast can be run by selecting ‘Forecast Variations from Budget’ from the ‘Management Reports’ tab.

Rebuild Forecast

A maintenance routine is included to rebuild the forecast. This should not normally be required, but if the situation arises where budget is amended, this procedure can rebuild the current forecast by updating the forecast to the (revised) budget plus or minus any previously entered variations from budget.

To use this procedure, simply click the 'Rebuild Forecast' button and read and confirm that this is what you want to do.  (Actually, there should be no harm done in any case.)