Budget by region and branch

Use the combined features of the Financial Statements and Budgets & Forecasts modules to efficiently budget at a regional and branch level.

User permissions: Budgets & Forecasts and Manage Budgets & Forecasts

The Financial Statements and Budgets & Forecasts modules work together to provide a comprehensive budgeting solution catering to several scenarios. This page explains how to combine the features of both modules to budget effectively by region and branch. You can adapt this information to meet your individual needs.

Scenario: Your organization operates across multiple regions (North, South, and so on). Each region has a dedicated manager and several branches. Each branch has its own manager.

1. Create the budget workbook

The most efficient way to create a budget workbook is to use the one-click budgeting feature in Financial Statements. See the Create a budget (Financial Statements) page for detailed information but for the purposes of this scenario, here's a summary of the steps:

1. Start by setting up your Profit and Loss statement to reflect your preferred budgeting structure. This step forms the foundation for your budget workbook, ensuring it aligns with your financial planning needs. In this scenario, you:

   1. Add the applicable dimensions as levels in the statement. This creates a nested view of your financial information, where you can expand the levels at which you want to budget. Ensure the levels are nested in the correct order to match your budget structure. In this example, the levels are Category > Region Manager > Branch > Account.

   2. Apply filters to exclude specific dimension entities as required. In this example, the Suspense entities in both the Regions and Branch dimensions are filtered out.

2. Change the period to one that matches the budget period. In this example, it's January to December 2025.

   
3. Click Budgets > Create budget to quickly generate a budget workbook based on the Profit and Loss statement's structure.

4. Move to the Budgets & Forecasts module to review the newly created workbook and make any necessary structural adjustments before starting the budgeting process.

   

2. Manage the workflow

As you created the budget, you are the budget owner, so the workflow starts and stops with you. You'll see your name against the baseline status in the workflow for all rows in the worksheet. You can delegate this task to the budget administrator, and take over the workflow at any time.

Expand the example below and see Manage the workflow for more information.

Example of the workflow for regions and branches

In this scenario, you start the workflow by assigning the Region rows to the applicable regional managers. If you want to do it yourself, follow these steps to quickly assign tasks in bulk.

1. Filter the Region dimension to focus on one region at a time, such as the North region.

2. Expand all rows to view the region's branches.

3. Select all rows with the Baseline workflow status.

4. Assign the selected rows to the applicable region manager.

5. Repeat the above steps to assign the other branches to their respective regional manager.

Those managers then reassign the rows to the applicable branch managers. The branch managers complete their assigned tasks as part of the overall budget process, using tools like spreads and formulas, then submit their competed tasks back to their regional managers for review. If accepted, the tasks are submitted back to you, the budget owner for the final review and sign-off.

Here's an example of workflow:

The workflow status of each row is clearly visible to everyone involved in the budgeting process. You can use the workflow history, workflow comments, and cell comments to keep track of what's happening.

3. Review, finalize and publish the budget

When the workflow is complete, you can review the budget and finalize the process by publishing the budget as a stream to make it available for use in the Financial Statements module.