About budget planning and forecasting

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After the Admin has configured your Apptio planning application, you can begin forecasting and planning your budget. See Configure and administer the Apptio planning applications.

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How budget planning and forecasting works in Apptio

Success with Apptio planning applications requires clear insight into user tasks and process flows. The following images show examples of tasks (columns) and user roles (rows) for budget planning tasks in Apptio planning applications. The images displays examples of a budget planning or forecasting process with three levels. You can adapt this process to meet your organizational needs. For example, your organization may have no budget owner, a single budget owner, or several layers of budget owners. Similarly, your organization may have one or multiple users who approve plans.

In the following examples, there is only one designated Budget Process Owner but probably multiple budget owners. Owners of a Parent Code in Departments reference data, or of enabled Projects, Services, or Business Unit reference data are considered group budget owners. See Manage Financial reference data.

Here is a budget planning workflow:

Here is a forecast planning workflow:

  • Budget Process Owners are responsible for creating the plan that budget owners will use to input data and track their spending. Budget Process Owners are also responsible for finalizing and closing plans.
  • Budget owners are responsible for inputting budget information for their Cost Objects. This can apply to single or group owners of departments, projects, services, or business units.
  • Approvers are assigned as designated people who can approve or reject submitted plans. Approvers are not tied to credential hierarchy but to the Cost Object hierarchy (see Manage Cost Object Permissions reference data). Apptio planning applications support up to five levels of approvers.

Forecasting

A forecast usually consists of:

  • A previous budget plan or forecast to serve as a baseline for the new forecast.
  • Monthly actuals that have been uploaded to your Apptio planning application (see Import and publish actuals). Historical actuals are not editable. If the new forecast includes actuals, but no future planned amounts, this represents unplanned spend.

Every forecast you create spans the full plan year (usually your fiscal year). For example, your plan year is a January-December calendar year. You previously created an annual budget plan and uploaded year-to-date actuals for January through March. Now, you want to create a forecast. In the new forecast, the January-March historical actuals are populated and the April-December line-item values are copied from the Budget Plan baseline:

After you have updated and finalized the new forecast, you can use it as the baseline for a subsequent forecast. If you use the Budget Plan as the baseline for the initial forecast of the year, then you can use each quarterly forecast as the baseline for the subsequent forecasts. For example, you can use the Budget Plan as a baseline for the Q1 forecast, then use the Q1 forecast as the baseline for the Q2 forecast, the Q2 forecast as the baseline for the Q3 forecast, and so on. The same sequencing logic applies for monthly or other forecasting periods.

Budget and forecast planning tasks