Rolling Forecasts (Budget vs Actual)

Throughout the year, use Jirav to update your assumptions and compare against your original budget

One of the core benefits of using Jirav for your financial planning and analysis is the ability to easily and quickly import accounting actuals to your forecast and compare them against how you thought the business would perform.

The first step to this process is to define a Plan of Record (POR) in Jirav within the Plans Management menu within Jirav.  Once you have completed this step you the next step is to create an Active plan from the POR by Cloning the plan.  The Active plan is what you will use to roll the forecast start period forward and use to compare your actuals agains your budget we have marked as a POR.

Here are the steps that you would take to achieve this outcome.

Step 1:

Set a plan as a POR. Here is an article that walks through how to do this.

Step 2:

Clone the POR to create an Active plan that you will use to update for changes in assumptions or projected amounts.

You should now have two plans like what you see in the screen shot below:

 

Step 3:

Update the forecast start date of the Active plan to begin rolling the forecast forward.  In the screen shot below you can see that the Forecast Start date is not April 2019.  What we can now do is compare the Active plan against the POR plan to see how Q1'2019 performed against our projections and update the Active plan for changes in forecast assumptions.

Step 4:

Create a report that compares what you projected against how the business actually performed.

You will note in the screen shot above that we are comparing the POR vs the Active Plan.  

-  Q1'2018 is the forecast that we created for the 2018 period from Step 1 above

-  Q1'2018  is the Active plan which has been updated to have accounting actuals for this period since we changed the forecast start date of the Active plan to April 2018; therefore the period Jan'18-March'18 is Accounting Actuals

- This is the POR and is the projected amounts 

- The Active plan Forecast Start date is April 2018 and has updated projections

An analysis of the report would read as follows.  

The company projected $110 in total revenue though actually sold $325,792 - a massive win for the company.  We continue to project conservatively at $210 for the second quarter which is down from the original forecast of $275.  

Step 5: 

As the Active plan is updated throughout the year you will then leverage the active plan to create the POR for the next year. 

Working with budget stakeholders throughout the year, say on a quarterly basis, will result in a much faster time to value for each years budget cycle since you will be working from a live budget that has been updated throughout the year.