How the pieces fit
SWOT builds a budget from your own trading history rather than a blank spreadsheet. It reads
the last 12 months of actuals, learns the seasonal pattern, and spreads a 12-month budget
across that shape. You then adjust what you want and compare against actuals as the year runs.
Four screens, in the order you meet them:
| Screen | Where | What it is for |
|---|
| Create Budget |
Administration |
Generate the year in one pass, with optional what-if and monthly shaping. |
| Edit Budget |
Administration |
Adjust the budget once it exists — cell by cell, or a whole group at a time by its
total. Also where rows are deleted or joined together. |
| Budget Report |
Main menu |
Budget against actuals, by rep, customer, product or category. Also where one
budget is compared against another and a draft is adopted. |
| Compare Scenarios |
Administration |
Two budgets side by side for the whole year — plan against plan, rather than plan
against actuals. |
| Budget Progress |
Main menu |
Month-to-date and year-to-date position against plan. |
One budget of record, plus as many drafts as you like
A financial year holds one Active budget — the one every report, favourite
and dashboard widget reads — and any number of Drafts beside it. A draft is
a complete alternative budget for the same year: build one to try a 5% uplift, a
reorganised territory or a pricing change without touching the number the business is
working to. When a draft turns out to be the better plan, adopt it and its
figures replace the Active budget's.
Everything below works the same whether or not you use drafts. Where your system has not
had scenarios switched on, the scenario controls simply do not appear and each year has a
single budget, exactly as before.
Budgets follow your financial year, not the calendar
Every budget screen works to the financial year set by your company's balance month — the
last month of your financial year. A June balance month means budget years run July to
June, and the year is pre-selected for you throughout. Nothing here assumes January.
1. Create the budget
Open Administration → Create Budget.
Confirm the year
Budget starts is pre-set to the correct financial year, so usually you
can leave it. Underneath, a Based on note names the exact 12 months of
actuals the budget will be built from, so the basis is never a guess.
Choose how to group it
Pick a Customer Category, a Product Category, or both.
At least one is required. Besides your own category dimensions, each side offers:
- All customers / All products — do not split that side at all.
- Top customers (RFM 80/20) + Sundry — budget the significant customers individually and pool the tail.
- Top products (80/20) + Sundry — the same idea on the product side.
Pick whichever matches how your team actually plans.
Decide on the salesman split
Leave Break out by salesman ticked and the budget is divided across reps
automatically. This is what later lets the Budget Report show the same plan by rep.
Apply what-if adjustments (optional)
A grid shows Baseline → Impact → New across Revenue, Cost,
Margin and Units, recalculating live as you type. Three drivers:
- Sale Price Change %
- Volume Change %
- Cost Price Change %
Leave them at zero for a like-for-like budget.
Or work backwards from a target
Instead of typing drivers, tick Hold sale price or
Hold volume, then type the New Revenue, Margin or Units
you want. The unlocked driver is back-solved to reach it. Useful when you have been given
a number rather than a percentage.
Generate it as a draft instead (optional)
Tick Generate as draft and give it a name — "FY27 with 5% uplift",
"Post-restructure" — and the whole year is written to a brand-new scenario.
Nothing existing is touched, so there is no overwrite warning and the budget the business
is working to carries on unchanged. Build as many as you like, then compare them and adopt
the winner.
Generate
Click Generate Budget. The confirmation reports how many rows were
created, the year, and the exact baseline window — for example
"Created 4,812 budget rows for the year starting Jul 2026 (baseline Jul 2025 - Jun 2026)."
A Budget preview grid of sales rep by month appears so you can sanity-check
the spread, with Edit Budget alongside it.
Generating replaces the whole year
If a budget already exists for that year you are warned first — "This will completely
overwrite the existing budget." Any hand edits made in Edit Budget are lost, so
regenerate before you fine-tune, not after.
This is exactly what Generate as draft avoids: a draft is written to its
own scenario, so regenerating never disturbs the budget in use. If you are experimenting on
a year that is already live, work in a draft.
2. Reshape and inflate
Below the what-if grid, Monthly adjustments controls how the annual total is
spread across the 12 months. Leave both options unticked to use the automatic seasonal curve
with no inflation — which is what most first budgets want.
Customise the monthly distribution
Ticking this reflows the annual total across months without changing the total. Choose what
to base the shape on:
- Even — every month gets the same share.
- Working days — months are weighted by trading days. A
Busy-day threshold (line items per day) decides which days count as
trading, so quiet days do not inflate a month's weight.
The per-month table can then be edited directly:
| Column | What it does |
|---|
| Working days | Trading days counted for that month, when using the working-days basis. |
| Monthly % | That month's share of the annual total. Edit to reshape by hand. |
| Revenue × | Multiplier applied to that month's revenue. |
| Cost × | Multiplier applied to that month's cost. |
Reset returns the table to the chosen basis if you want to start again.
Apply monthly inflation
Ticking this compounds a monthly increase through the year rather than applying a flat uplift.
Revenue inflation is taken from the Sale Price Change % and cost inflation
from the Cost Price Change %, compounded each month so the rate is reached by
year-end. Cost follows the same monthly pattern as revenue.
The two work together
Distribution decides how much lands in each month; inflation decides how the
rate builds across them. You can use either alone, or both — adjust individual months
in the table afterwards to allow for seasonal effects.
3. Edit and fine-tune
Click Edit Budget on the confirmation, or open
Administration → Edit Budget.
-
Pick the year, then narrow with the Sales Rep,
Customer and Product filters, or press
Load entire budget. Loading a slice keeps large budgets responsive — until
you choose, the grid prompts "Choose a filter to load a slice, or Load entire budget."
- Switch Measure between Revenue, Cost and Units.
- Type over any monthly cell.
Two behaviours make editing safe:
-
Pro-rata trio — change a cell's revenue and its matching cost and units
scale with it, so margins stay coherent.
-
Lock row totals / Lock column totals — with these ticked,
an edit is redistributed across the other months (or other reps) to hold the total steady.
This reshapes how the budget is spread without moving the bottom line.
Columns sort, labels and totals stay frozen as you scroll, and Export to Excel
is available at any point. Revert restores the last saved version;
Commit budget changes saves. Only cells you actually changed are sent — if
there are none you are told "No changes to commit." — and navigating away with
unsaved edits prompts first.
Editing by totals instead of line by line
A budget built at rep × customer × product grain can run to thousands of rows, and
raising one salesman's year by 5% a row at a time is not realistic. The View
dropdown rolls the loaded rows up to a single line per group:
| View | One row per |
|---|
| Detail | Every budget line, as stored — the default. |
| By Sales Rep | Sales rep. |
| By Customer | Customer, or customer group where the budget is held at category grain. |
| By Product | Product, or product group. |
Only the dimensions your budget actually carries are offered — the others are greyed out. A
budget built without a product split has nothing to roll up By Product, so the option
is not selectable.
Type a new figure over any monthly total and every budget line behind it is rescaled
pro-rata, each keeping its share of the group. Cost and units move with the
revenue exactly as they do on a single cell, so margins hold. A rounding pass puts any leftover
cents on the largest contributor, so the group sums to precisely the number you typed rather
than a cent away from it.
Two details worth knowing before you start typing:
-
The Total column is a read-out, not an entry box. It sits frozen beside the
labels, it sorts (click the heading to rank reps by size), but the year is shaped by editing
the months. To lift a whole year by 5%, raise each month by 5% — or use a what-if at
Create Budget, which is what that screen is for.
-
A group sitting at zero splits evenly. Pro-rata needs existing shares to
work from; where a month's group total is zero there are none, so the figure you type is
divided equally across the rows behind it. Only the measure you are editing is set — cost
and units cannot be inferred from a zero base, so set those explicitly if the month matters.
The total locks switch off in a totals view
Lock row totals and Lock column totals grey out as soon as
you leave Detail, and that is deliberate: editing a total is a redistribution, and
running a second one over the top of it would make the result almost impossible to predict.
Use the locks in Detail to reshape without moving the bottom line; use a totals view to move
the bottom line and let the shape follow.
Totals reflect what is loaded
If you arrived through a filter, the totals are the totals of that slice — a
customer total under a single rep is that rep's share of the customer, not the whole. The
banner above the grid says which you are looking at. Use Load entire budget
for the complete picture. Switching between Detail and a totals view keeps any unsaved
edits; they live on the same underlying rows.
Removing and combining rows
Two problems can only be fixed by changing which rows exist, not their values: a rep who has
left and whose budget should pass to a colleague, and the same group entered twice under
different spellings — Mitre10 and Mitre 10, or a name with a stray trailing
space. Both are handled from any totals view.
Tick the box beside a row, then use the buttons above the grid:
-
Delete selected — available with one or more rows ticked. Removes every
budget line for those values.
-
Join two — available with exactly two ticked. You are asked which of the two
should remain, then the other is folded into it. Amounts are added together month by
month, so nothing is lost: the survivor's total afterwards is the sum of the two before.
A name that begins or ends with a space is flagged with a ␣ badge, because
otherwise it looks identical to the clean version on screen — which is usually how the duplicate
went unnoticed in the first place.
These act on the whole budget, and cannot be undone
Unlike cell edits, delete and join apply to every row carrying that value across the
whole budget year — not just the slice on screen — and they take effect immediately.
Revert does not bring them back. Both ask you to confirm, naming exactly what
will happen; read the confirmation before accepting.
Joining fixes the budget, not the sales history
Where you are merging two spellings of the same group, remember the actuals still carry both.
The Budget Report reads actuals through your customer and product categories, so it will
compare the combined budget against only part of the sales until the underlying customer or
product data is corrected. Fix the spelling at source as well, or the report will look wrong
in the other direction.
4. Budget Report — budget against actuals
Open Budget Report from the main menu.
- Budget year — which budget to track against.
-
View by — Sales Rep, Customer,
Product, or any of your category dimensions. One budget, many lenses; no
rebuilding required.
-
Show — six measures. Variance (actual minus budget,
colour-coded so shortfalls stand out), Budget (the plan),
Actual, and three that read the margin rate rather than the amounts:
Margin % (Actual), Margin % (Budget) and
Margin % Variance — the gap between those two in percentage points,
colour-coded the same way.
-
YTD only — appears on the two variance measures. It drops months that have
not been traded yet; without it a future month shows its whole budget as a shortfall and
every row reads as behind plan.
Double-click a group row to show the items inside it, then step back with the
return control. Headers and totals stay pinned while you scroll. Use
Export to Excel to share, or Save to Favourites to pin this
exact year, view and measure for one-click return next month.
Margin percentages are weighted, never added up
On the three margin measures, a row, column or grand total is the overall rate for
everything it covers — total margin over total revenue — so it lands somewhere inside the
range of the cells rather than above them. A customer ten times the size moves it ten times
as much. A cell with no revenue behind it shows a dash rather than 0%.
Reporting on a draft, and adopting it
Where the year holds more than one budget, a second row of controls appears beneath the first:
-
Scenario — which budget to report on. It opens on the Active one, the
budget of record, so the default view is always the real plan.
-
Compare with — pick a second budget and the grid gains a column for it,
alongside the difference between the two. Useful for reading a draft against the live plan
on the same page, month by month.
-
Adopt — appears once you are looking at the Active budget with a draft
selected as the comparison. It copies the draft's figures over the Active budget, after a
confirmation that names both. The comparison is then cleared, because the two now hold the
same numbers.
Adopting keeps your favourites and widgets pointing at the right thing
Adopting replaces the figures in the Active budget rather than promoting the draft
to take its place. Everything already pointing at the Active budget — saved favourites,
dashboard widgets, the Budget Progress screen — carries on working and simply shows the new
numbers. The draft is left as it was, so there is still a record of what was adopted.
Why one budget covers every view
The budget is stored at sales rep and category grain, so the same plan can be read by rep
this week and by region next week, switching measures as you go, without touching the
underlying numbers.
5. Compare Scenarios — plan against plan
Open Administration → Compare Scenarios. Where the Budget Report holds a
budget up against actuals, this screen holds two budgets up against each other for the whole
year — the screen to open when you have built a draft and want to know exactly what adopting
it would change, before you adopt it.
Choose the year, Scenario A and Scenario B,
and what to View by — Sales Rep, Customer or Product — then
Load. Each group gets one line, in three bands:
| Band | Columns |
|---|
| Revenue | A, B, and the difference. |
| Margin |
A, B, the difference, and a Margin % column reading
A% → B% with the change in percentage points beside it. |
| Units | A, B, and the difference. |
Every difference column is signed and coloured — green where B is above A, red where it is
below — so a scan down the page shows immediately who gains and who loses under the other
plan. A totals row closes the grid, and Export to Excel takes the whole
comparison with you.
Reading the margin column
The two percentages are each scenario's own margin rate for that group, and the figure in
brackets is the movement between them in percentage points. A group with no budgeted revenue
in one of the scenarios shows a dash: with nothing to take a percentage of, printing 0.00%
would read as a real and disastrous margin rather than an absence.
Where the numbers meet
This screen compares whole-year totals, which is the right altitude for choosing between two
plans. When you want the same comparison month by month, set the second budget as
Compare with on the Budget Report instead. Adopting is done from there too.
6. Budget Progress
Budget Progress on the main menu answers a narrower question than the Budget
Report: how far through the plan are we right now. Choose a Type — Sales Rep,
Customer or Product — and a measure of Revenue, Margin,
Margin % or Units, and it shows month-to-date and
year-to-date against budget, with a Total row pinned at the foot of the grid.
Use the Budget Report when you want to interrogate the gap; use Budget Progress for the quick
read on whether you are ahead or behind.
Margin % behaves differently from the other three
It is a rate, not an amount, so the column headings change to read MTD Actual %,
Month Goal %, MTD Variance (pts) and so on, and two rules follow. Its
month-to-date budget is the full month's budgeted rate rather than a part-month
share — a budgeted 35% margin is 35% on the 3rd as much as on the 30th, so there is nothing
to scale down as the month runs. And the Total row is the overall achieved rate, weighted by
revenue: it deliberately does not equal the sum of the rates above it.
A monthly rhythm
-
Once a year — generate next year's budget, applying a what-if if you already
have growth or pricing targets, and shape the months if your trade is seasonal.
-
While the plan is still being argued — build the alternatives as drafts
rather than overwriting anything, put them side by side in Compare Scenarios, and adopt the
one that wins the argument. The business keeps working to the Active budget throughout.
-
At the start — spend a few minutes in Edit Budget weighting particular reps
or categories: the total locks to redistribute rather than re-key, or a totals view to move
a whole rep's month in one figure.
-
Every month — open the Budget Report, read the variance by rep, then switch
View by to customer or region to find where the gap comes from. Save the
views you check regularly as Favourites.
-
At a glance — keep the Budget widget on your dashboard for the
month-to-date and year-to-date position between reviews.