Secure and distribute a completed budget or forecast

Use these options to lock down your completed budget or forecast so you can protect the data, prevent accidental changes and safely share the finalized version with others.

Although only the term budget is used on this page, this information also applies to forecasts.

When a budget is complete, you might want to lock its cells to avoid unintentional changes. Due to the dynamic nature of Budgets & Forecasts, there is no single mechanism to lock the budget. Workbooks are linked to baseline streams, so the data updates when those streams update. Similarly, Database and Reference tabs update due to changes in databases to which they're linked. In addition, the structure of the workbook is based on the structure of the underlying data, so changes to this can have an impact. There are a number of options for mitigating the risk of unintentional changes.

Mark rows as complete

When you mark a row as complete in the budget workflow, no one is assigned to that row so it is no longer editable. This prevents any further manual changes to the values and helps you avoid overwriting data accidentally, especially when you run bulk actions such as spread or copy down.

Rows marked as complete still update with baseline changes, because completing a row does not remove its link to the baseline.

See Manage the workflow > Mark a row as complete

Fix the baseline

If a cell hasn't been overwritten with a value or formula, it remains linked to the baseline stream. When the baseline stream changes, the value in the workbook will also change.

The same applies to the budget structure. If a new dimension entity is introduced into the baseline period, such as a new customer, it will appear in the workbook the next time you open it.

To prevent these changes, you can fix the baseline (disassociate the workbook from its baseline values).

See Fix the baseline in a budget

Publish the budget

The workbook publishing process creates a copy of the values and stores them as a stream in the underlying database. You can use the published stream in reports and dashboards, and as a backup to the values in the workbook.

However, the published stream does not include formulas, working rows, comments, workflow or cell history, so it is not a full backup of the workbook itself.

See Publish a budget, forecast or other worksheet tab

Structure your budget to avoid losing data

If your budget hierarchy includes dimension groups, you might lose budget data when dimension entities move within the workbook structure. To reduce that risk, include a transaction grouping dimension in the workbook structure.

See Structure your budget to avoid losing data