Dynamics 365 Business Central: Budgeting & Forecasting

Hey. My name is Mark. And today, we'll be looking at Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, specifically around the the budgeting aspect of it, building out a simple budget, and then being able to track, you know, take a look at tracking your cost of goods sold, and viewing that against actual reporting. Hey, what are we actually earning? What are we actually spending? So we'll look at that both from that cost of goods side of things as well as the income. So getting us started here, we are in our home screen. Hopefully, this isn't, completely foreign. But this is where we will go and navigate to view our budgets. So we just search for budgets. We'll click on GL budgets. As you can see here, there's a list view. While we only have one budget here currently, the default, we can actually go ahead and create a new one. Maybe we'll name this our twenty twenty five, but really the reason why we have multiple budgets is that it gives you the flexibility to do, hey. Maybe we wanna click May five v one, first pass budget. Right? Maybe you want to run various what if scenarios. Right? Alright. So we've created that. We do have our global dimension and one and two. So we have our department and customer group, shown there. Let's go ahead and click into our twenty twenty five budget that we created, and then I will flip this over to view by year. Alright. So we're here in our twenty twenty five budget. Few callouts here. We do have the lines set up to show as GL accounts. We have all of our months. We're looking at view by month here just across every single one of these rows. And then you'll see here because this is set up by GL account, every single one of our GL accounts is going to have a row. While, you know, for this chart of accounts, we do have a lot of accounts. This really lets us get very granular, and then all of this will roll into the financial reporting when they go to view that. Just to get us started here, let's say that, you know, maybe I wanna enter in a few values for each month on the budget. Let's look at it from a cost of goods sold perspective. Right? I'm going to go into my filters, select the cost of goods sold category, and then I will expand out our budget matrix. This is every line again by month. So specifically, you know, I know my cost of materials and, you know, maybe I wanna budget this out over the entire year. Let's go ahead and say that January, you know, I'm going to have spent ten thousand. Just gonna punch in a few numbers here for some of the months. And just get us up through our current month here. Give it a little bit of a number so we can kinda see where we are at there. Okay. So this is one way to do it. Obviously, if you're filling out every single row in your entire, chart of accounts, if you have a lot of accounts, this could be a lot of work doing it this way. While we can edit that in the budget matrix view within Business Central, we can also do this as an export to Excel. Go ahead, populate in. Maybe, you know, we send it to other heads of departments for them to populate their data for their specific sections, and then we can go ahead and import that back into Business Central. So just to show that process here, you know, we're able to use this export to Excel. We have the start date. We can say this is for twelve months, and then maybe we do want to include again, if we're including other departments, we can pull in the various dimensions for some of those. Let me go ahead and run this again. You can filter down the specific as well. Alright. So now that we have our, cost of goods budget lines entered in the system and we've exported and are now looking at the Excel template for for the budget, for twenty twenty five. Let's go ahead and enter a few more lines. So, again, this Excel template would be really useful if you're sharing or having, some of the other department heads or folks at your company, combine some efforts and then put together their budgets. And then you want to load that, or you just are comfortable in Excel and, you know, you want to make the entries here instead. So, with that, we are gonna go down and look for our income rows. So here you will see our sale of finished goods. And again, we, you know, we have each month kind of over here. You could lock that so you can see the the header there. But, one thing that I will show is that we do have the ability to enter in the customer group. So that was one of our global dimensions that we had selected when we set the budget up, and then we exported Excel. You'll see here that we have the ability to say, hey. This is a large, medium, or small company. And so maybe, you know, we want to enter in small. You can actually duplicate this row and have small, medium, large for the same account in the same file, but let's keep it simple here. And again, you can also enter your department, right, if you wanna have that level of granularity. Alright. Let's we'll cut this short section because I'm gonna go ahead and grab my values that I've got staged down here. Alright. And then when it comes to actually entering in our monthly values, I'm gonna go ahead and enter in a few of them here. Maybe we have even more on top of that. But once we have all of our values entered for the month, I think right now this is kind of through July and not all the way, but, that's all we'll do for the entry. We'll go ahead and save the file. Now that the file is saved, we will go back over into now we're back over into Business Central. We then have the ability to go ahead and import from Excel. In this, you know, we can do replace entries. Any we had loaded already, it will completely wipe and replace, so we'll go ahead and do that. We'll select my alright. And we'll go ahead and replace. So now you'll see that the budget I've uploaded, there are entries in here for that sale of finished goods. We've got all of our values here. Alright. So now that we have all of our values loaded into the budget, really what can we do with that in the system? So one of the main things that we can do with that is utilize that in conjunction with our financial reports. So let's go ahead and pull up our financial reports page. We are going to look at our income statement here, view the reports. And so we are using a column definition that's specifically for our year to date, month to date, and includes our budget. And I do want to note that we have it filtered down for June here. Now we're gonna go ahead and hide the options just so we can take a look at, again, only our report. So what is this showing here? We'll start with the, income and the budget that we entered. So in this month, June, we have nine million dollar actual, income. And then on that budget side of things, you know, we are showing, that we have a eight million dollar actual or eight million dollar budget compared to our nine million actual. So it will categorize the difference here and calculate that. Likewise, on the year to date side of things, you can see our accumulated year to date actual versus that budget, and then that difference. And all of that will total out same thing when it comes to the materials, and all of the cost of goods sold there as well as how that totals out on the on the profits and income lines. Alright. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of perspective about what's possible around managing and editing a budget in Business Central using Excel or directly in the system, and how and why we'd use that in relation to our financial report.