The tables behind Budgeting & Forecasting

The annual or quarterly planning cycle. One Cycle per fiscal year per cadence (Annual, mid year reforecast, quarterly update). Status gates whether Versions inside it can still be edited.

Cost centers, departments, programs, and legal entities being budgeted. Hierarchical (Department rolls into Division rolls into legal entity). Mirrors and extends the chart of accounts dimension.

Versions within a Cycle. The audit-friendly chain — V1-Submission, V2-negotiation CFO, V3-board approved, mid year reforecast — so the trail of who proposed what and what the board approved survives.

The atomic line of the plan. Each cell keeps its version, period, account, entity and scenario. Budget cells are unique within that basis. Forecast cells additionally require rolling forecast and snapshot key; Actual cells require a reconciled ledger snapshot key. A comparison names its chosen bases explicitly instead of joining ambiguous latest rows. Published snapshots and locked plan amounts are immutable.

Top-down financial targets cascaded from CFO down to Entities. Revenue, op ex, EBITDA, and Cash by Entity by Period — the goalposts the bottom-up budget submissions are negotiated against.

Approval-step audit trail for a budget revision or its specific budget transfer. Cost-Center Head submits; FP&A Analyst reviews, FP&A Director approves the planning review and CFO gives final financial approval. External board evidence is recorded separately by CFO. A transfer uses its configured Director/CFO route rather than approving the whole version again.

Audit trail of every Driver, driver value, and driver formula change plus every budget transfer apply. The auditor’s source of truth for “what assumption produced what number when.”

Input drivers used by formulas — Headcount, avg salary, rent per SF, sales growth pct, benefit load pct, billable utilization pct. Catalog + default values; per-Entity per-Period values live in driver values.

Per Driver per Entity per Period the actual numeric value used by formulas. The grain mirrors budget lines so a Headcount value for (Engineering, 2026-03-01) resolves cleanly into the Personnel Expense formula for the same cell.

Formula definitions referencing Drivers and other driver formulas. Resolved at computation time per (Version, Entity, Period, Scenario) cell; output writes a budget lines row of Type: Budget (or Forecast). Driver dependency tracing is performed at workflow #4 (driver-update-cascade) evaluation time using one validated expression grammar: Drivers.CODE and Formulas.CODE identifiers. Validate dependencies and reject cycles before publishing any affected cells. A failed computation leaves the last published snapshot intact and reports cycle detected to FP&A Analyst. There is no separate dependency-graph table.

The atomic line of the plan. Each cell keeps its version, period, account, entity and scenario. Budget cells are unique within that basis. Forecast cells additionally require rolling forecast and snapshot key; Actual cells require a reconciled ledger snapshot key. A comparison names its chosen bases explicitly instead of joining ambiguous latest rows. Published snapshots and locked plan amounts are immutable.

Audit trail of every Driver, driver value, and driver formula change plus every budget transfer apply. The auditor’s source of truth for “what assumption produced what number when.”

Per-Account (optionally per-Entity) thresholds that drive variance materiality flagging and flux-comment requirements. Read by the variance-recompute workflow at evaluation time.

What-if scenarios — Base, Upside, Downside, board commit, back of the envelope. Cloned from a parent Scenario via the scenario-clone-and-version workflow; lineage tracked in Lineage.

Outputs of the scenario engine. One row per scenario execution recording inputs deltas vs. base, and the resulting EBITDA / Cash deltas. Powers the Scenario Comparison report.

Versions within a Cycle. The audit-friendly chain — V1-Submission, V2-negotiation CFO, V3-board approved, mid year reforecast — so the trail of who proposed what and what the board approved survives.

The atomic line of the plan. Each cell keeps its version, period, account, entity and scenario. Budget cells are unique within that basis. Forecast cells additionally require rolling forecast and snapshot key; Actual cells require a reconciled ledger snapshot key. A comparison names its chosen bases explicitly instead of joining ambiguous latest rows. Published snapshots and locked plan amounts are immutable.

Per Driver per Entity per Period the actual numeric value used by formulas. The grain mirrors budget lines so a Headcount value for (Engineering, 2026-03-01) resolves cleanly into the Personnel Expense formula for the same cell.

Formula definitions referencing Drivers and other driver formulas. Resolved at computation time per (Version, Entity, Period, Scenario) cell; output writes a budget lines row of Type: Budget (or Forecast). Driver dependency tracing is performed at workflow #4 (driver-update-cascade) evaluation time using one validated expression grammar: Drivers.CODE and Formulas.CODE identifiers. Validate dependencies and reject cycles before publishing any affected cells. A failed computation leaves the last published snapshot intact and reports cycle detected to FP&A Analyst. There is no separate dependency-graph table.

Audit trail of every Driver, driver value, and driver formula change plus every budget transfer apply. The auditor’s source of truth for “what assumption produced what number when.”

The rolling N-month forward view that updates monthly. Distinct from budget versions — Forecast is a living revision, Budget is a locked plan. The rolling window slides as months close.

Per Entity per rolling forecast submission of the Entity’s view of the forecast window. The bottom-up input the Cost-Center Head provides each month (or each cadence).

Top-down overlays by FP&A on top of the Entity-submitted forecast. Kept separate so the audit trail preserves “what the Entity said” alongside “what FP&A overlaid.”

The atomic line of the plan. Each cell keeps its version, period, account, entity and scenario. Budget cells are unique within that basis. Forecast cells additionally require rolling forecast and snapshot key; Actual cells require a reconciled ledger snapshot key. A comparison names its chosen bases explicitly instead of joining ambiguous latest rows. Published snapshots and locked plan amounts are immutable.

Periodic Actual-vs-Budget-vs-Forecast per (Version, Period, Entity, Account, ActualsSnapshotKey, ForecastSnapshotKey, TransferCutoff). Materialized monthly by the variance-recompute workflow on Actuals load. The grain Cost-Center Heads defend at the close meeting.

Quarterly (or monthly) board financial packets. Generated 5 business days before each board meeting from the explicitly selected budget revision and accepted forecast snapshot recorded in snapshot manifest.

Read-mirror of open POs and signed contracts from SCM Procurement (and other source systems). Consume budget alongside Actuals so available to spend is current.

Mid-year reallocation of approved budget between Entities or Accounts. Each Transfer is an append-only balanced adjustment: subtract Amount from the source cell and add Amount to the destination cell. Approvals authorize the exact transfer revision. Applying adds its deltas to effective budget, preserving the original locked budget line amount.

The annual or quarterly planning cycle. One Cycle per fiscal year per cadence (Annual, mid year reforecast, quarterly update). Status gates whether Versions inside it can still be edited.

The atomic line of the plan. Each cell keeps its version, period, account, entity and scenario. Budget cells are unique within that basis. Forecast cells additionally require rolling forecast and snapshot key; Actual cells require a reconciled ledger snapshot key. A comparison names its chosen bases explicitly instead of joining ambiguous latest rows. Published snapshots and locked plan amounts are immutable.

Approval-step audit trail for a budget revision or its specific budget transfer. Cost-Center Head submits; FP&A Analyst reviews, FP&A Director approves the planning review and CFO gives final financial approval. External board evidence is recorded separately by CFO. A transfer uses its configured Director/CFO route rather than approving the whole version again.

Audit trail of every Driver, driver value, and driver formula change plus every budget transfer apply. The auditor’s source of truth for “what assumption produced what number when.”

Periodic Actual-vs-Budget-vs-Forecast per (Version, Period, Entity, Account, ActualsSnapshotKey, ForecastSnapshotKey, TransferCutoff). Materialized monthly by the variance-recompute workflow on Actuals load. The grain Cost-Center Heads defend at the close meeting.

Narrative explanations of material variances. One or more per variance analyses row. Provided by the Cost-Center Head, reviewed by FP&A Analyst.

Per-Account (optionally per-Entity) thresholds that drive variance materiality flagging and flux-comment requirements. Read by the variance-recompute workflow at evaluation time.

Quarterly (or monthly) board financial packets. Generated 5 business days before each board meeting from the explicitly selected budget revision and accepted forecast snapshot recorded in snapshot manifest.

Versions within a Cycle. The audit-friendly chain — V1-Submission, V2-negotiation CFO, V3-board approved, mid year reforecast — so the trail of who proposed what and what the board approved survives.

The rolling N-month forward view that updates monthly. Distinct from budget versions — Forecast is a living revision, Budget is a locked plan. The rolling window slides as months close.

Audit trail of every Driver, driver value, and driver formula change plus every budget transfer apply. The auditor’s source of truth for “what assumption produced what number when.”

A scoped employee identity directory synchronized from the organization identity or HR source. This reference supports ownership and approval attribution; it does not add payroll or HR administration. Role membership alone never grants access to every directory field. External auditors and portal users receive only the identities needed for their granted work.

A read-only reference mirror of ledger accounts used for planning, actuals and variance analysis. The connected ledger owns account creation, posting permissions and balances. Import keys are unique per ledger entity; this mirror does not turn the planning application into a general ledger.