The half-way point in your financial year is always a good time to step back and review how you’re going, adjust your forecasts and plan for the rest of the year. Follow these tips to take stock, do a mid-year budget review and get the most out of Calxa.
If you are new to budgeting, start by looking at this article Good Budgeting Processes. It highlights the process of creating your budget. But for now, let’s get started with your existing budget and how to do your mid-year budget review.
Mid-Year Budget Review in Calxa
Doing the Review with Calxa, you would use this process to go through.
- Identify the Forecast Budget Reports you need
- Manage your new Budget Version
- Copy the Budget
- Create your Re-Forecast using the Budget Factory
- Import your Complex Calculations
1.Forecast Budget Reports for a Mid-Year Budget Review
There are some useful reports to help you with your mid-year budget review and re-forecasting. Try these to start with:
- P & L Revised vs Approved (12 months). This report uses Actuals up to the current month, your Current Forecast budget for the remainder of the year and compares the projected total to the Approved Budget (or the original one).
- P & L Reforecast Unspent to meet Budget. This again uses Actuals to the current month and recalculates your budget for the remainder of the year to show what needs to be done to achieve the full year budget.
- Actual & Full Year Forecast vs Budget. The forecast on this report is year-to-date actuals plus the budget for the rest of the year.
2.Create another Budget Version – but only one!
If you’ve only recently started with Calxa, you’ll probably just have an Initial Budget Version (unless you’ve renamed it). You can make a copy of this, rename it to Current Forecast, and then make your changes to the rest of the year.
If you already have a Current Forecast that you created last year, don’t create another one! The budget version contains all years and your business units so what you need to do is to copy the current budget into your Current Forecast. There are a couple of simple ways to do this which we cover as part of the next steps.
3.Copy your Budget
The first option is the Budget Factory. Set the Source to your initial budget and the year to the current year. Set the Destination to the same financial year and the destination budget to the Current Forecast. Then step through to the end without changing any numbers and it will do a straight copy from the initial budget to the current forecast. This method works especially well if you have many business units.
The next option is to export your Initial Budget to a spreadsheet and then import it to the Current Forecast. This makes sense if you want to make the adjustments for the rest of the year in a spreadsheet or you’re delegating the task to other department managers. You could also give those managers access to Calxa and let them edit the budgets there.
4.Create your Re-Forecast
Some people like to start their forecast by using the actual results for the first half of the year and adjusting the budget for the rest of the year. The simplest way to do this is again with the Budget Factory.
First, check in the Budget Manager that the Initial or Approved budget is set as your main budget. If it is, it will be at the top of the list and the first one selected when you use the Budget Builder. If not, use the ellipsis menu to the right and then Set as Main Budget.
Then in the Budget Factory, set the Source to Actuals and the current year. You’ll get a warning to say that there aren’t actuals available for the whole year so it will use your main budget for the remainder. Set the Destination to your Current Forecast and the same year.
This will populate your Current Forecast with Actuals for the completed months of the year, the main budget for the second half. You can then go ahead and make changes to the 2nd half based on your revised plans.
A mid-year budget review helps you look forward to the second part of the year. If you’re not using Calxa as yet, have a look at our Budgeting Features.
5.Import Complex Calculations
In your mid-year budget review you may want to plan for some upcoming changes. Sometimes you need to do some complex calculations to create your budget and these are (for now) best done is a spreadsheet.
Start by exporting the budget from Calxa. You’ll find that under Budget Tools. Then trim down your spreadsheet to just what you need. Keep the 6 columns to the left as they identify the rows, but you can delete any rows you’re not changing. At this time of the year, it also makes sense to delete the months you’re not updating. So, for example, you could remove the July–December columns and just update January to June. Of course, this is assuming you have a June year-end.
Your workings can be on another sheet or below the rows to import – the import stops at the first blank row (or column so you could have workings to the right as well). Best practice would be a separate sheet but either method will work.
Import your new calculated budget for the rows and months you want to change, and they will be updated, leaving everything else as it was.
We are working on adding formulas to your Calxa budgets. Look out for our change logs in the next couple of months.
Wrap Up your Mid-Year Budgets
It makes sense to create a report bundle using some of the reports mentioned above so that you can clearly see the effect of the changes you’ve made. By putting the reports in a bundle you’ll be able to easily run them any time you do a review.
To see a mid-year budget review in action, watch this webinar recording. If you are coming up to a new financial year, you might want to read how to Prepare Next Year’s Budgets.