Once you've finished setting up your budget in Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) and imported actual results of your company, you may want to add a forecast version to your budget.
In SIP, you can use a combination of budget and actuals data to help create your financial forecasts and update your company’s budget throughout the budget year. Your budget can be adjusted as you obtain actuals data and reassess your plan.
How do I create my forecast?
We’ve got you covered! Forecasts can be easily created using the History window in SIP.
It’s recommended that you use a version of your budget that has been finalized and approved. To begin, save your working budget as your base budget which serves as a reference to all of your future forecast.
1. From the Inputs > Main tab, click History on the left-hand side of the second navigation bar.
2. From the popup window, save your working budget as the base budget to which you can compare your actuals and base your budget forecasts. Type in a version name for your base budget and choose Base budget from the dropdown and click Add.
3. The saved version is displayed in the list along with all the other saved versions. Now that you saved the base budget, you can close the popup and make changes directly from the Inputs tab.
4. Once you're finished making changes, click History again to save your working budget as a forecast. Name your forecast, choose Forecast from the dropdown and click Add.
How do I work with my saved forecast?
From the Sheets view and from the Dashboard, you can choose to view your working budget or Budget vs. Actuals, or you can view your forecasts or Forecast vs. Actuals display.
📝 A rolling view of your budget also displays a combination of actuals (if they exist) and your working budget. See Get a combined view of your actuals and budget for more information.
For example, in the following view you can see your forecast (Q1 forecast) versus your actuals.
By default, actuals data replaces your forecast data in your budget, but you can also choose to exclude them.
From the Actuals > Summary tab, click on the Actuals column of the months that have actuals to display the dropdown and choose Exclude in forecast to exclude the actuals from your forecast.
If you don’t have actuals in your budget for certain months in your budget range, only the Forecast column is displayed for those months with no actuals data.
When you save the latest version of your working budget as a new forecast in SIP, the actuals data in the new saved version replaces the forecast data in the months where Include in forecast is selected.
From the Sheets view, your forecast might look similar to the following.
From the Dashboard view, your forecast might look similar to this:
Just choose the version(s) you'd like to view, and you're all done!