Automatic budget generation (top-down method)

With the top-down method, you use budgets or realisations from previous years as the starting points for a new budget. You copy (parts of) old budgets or realisations to a new budget and you can increase or decrease this new budget automatically using a percentage.

Contents

Description

Using the top-down method, you automatically generate a budget over one allocation axis for one account or a selection of multiple accounts. In doing so, the budgets are based on the budgets or realised figures from previous years.

Example:

Annual budget Computer Costs: 120,000

  • Axis 1 with the allocation percentages to location: 1. North 40% and 2. South 60%
  • Axis 2 with the allocation percentages to department: 1. Board 10%, 2. Sales 20% and 3. R&D 70%

    If you choose allocation on Axis 1, you only get the following information:

  • North 40%: 48,000
  • South 60%: 72,000

    If you choose allocation on Axis 2, you only get the following information:

  • Board 10% 12,000
  • Sales 20% 24,000
  • R&D 70% 84,000

Automatic allocation distribution

If you use the top-down method, you can distribute a budget automatically over the allocation codes on this axis. This distribution is determined by the distribution of the data on which the new budget is based. For example, a budget that is created based on an original budget or realised historical entries. The distributions from these existing entries are copied in the new budget.

If you want to generate budgets for one or more accounts, you can create allocations on multiple axes for this account selection in a number of steps. For each axis, you generate the budget again for the same selection of accounts.

In this way you can obtain a distribution over multiple axes, but you do not have the option to combine information from multiple allocation axes (see the example above).  

Example:

You can view the budget amount for location 'North' from Axis 1 (48,000) or the budget amount for the 'R&D' department on Axis 2 (84,000). However, you cannot immediately see that the budget amount for location 'North' for the 'R&D' department is 33,600 (120,000 x 40% x 70%).

Procedure

Directly to

  1. Add a budget
  2. Budget manually (bottom-up method)
  3. Generate a budget automatically (top-down method)