Budget Management

Budget management in AI-native ERP supports the full planning cycle: create budget versions, populate them with account-level targets, route them through approval, and track performance against actuals. Multi-version support lets you maintain original budgets, revised forecasts, and scenario plans simultaneously.

Budget Versions#

A budget version is a named container for a set of budget lines tied to a fiscal year and legal entity. You can create multiple versions for the same year -- an original approved budget, a mid-year revision, a best-case scenario, and a worst-case scenario. Each version has its own approval status (draft, submitted, approved, locked, archived) and can be managed independently.

Budget versions support annual, quarterly, and monthly granularity. Annual budgets distribute amounts across the full year. Quarterly budgets allow different targets per quarter. Monthly budgets provide the most detailed planning with per-month amounts for each account.

Budget Lines#

Each budget line ties a dollar amount to an account and period within a version. You can add lines individually or use bulk upsert to populate many lines at once. Budget templates let you create reusable line structures that can be applied to new versions, speeding up the annual planning process.

Lines can carry dimension tags (department, project, cost center) that enable multi-dimensional budget analysis. You can budget $500,000 for salary expense in the Engineering department, $200,000 for the Sales team, and $150,000 for Marketing -- all on the same GL account but with different dimension values.

Approval Workflow#

Budgets follow a structured approval lifecycle. Drafts can be edited freely. When ready, you submit the budget for approval. Approvers can review the totals, drill into line-level detail, and either approve or reject with feedback. Approved budgets can be locked to prevent any modifications, and eventually archived when superseded by a new version.

Reopening a locked budget requires elevated authorization, reflecting the seriousness of modifying committed financial plans.

Variance Analysis#

The real value of budgeting emerges in variance analysis. You can compare budget amounts to actual GL balances for any period, seeing both the dollar variance and percentage variance by account. This tells you which areas of the business are tracking to plan and which need attention.

Variance reports combine budget data with actual transaction data from the ledger, giving you a single view of planned versus actual performance without manual spreadsheet reconciliation.