Features that remove friction from the budget cycle

Every feature in Budgetaris Desktop exists to remove one specific piece of friction from the planning process. This page describes the feature set in plain language, grouped by the job each one does for your finance team.

Planning and modeling

Chart of accounts and dimensions. Budgetaris comes with a standard B2B chart of accounts and lets you add your own dimensions — department, entity, region, product line, project. Every line of the model can carry any combination of dimensions, and rollups respect the hierarchy you define.

Driver-based models. Instead of typing a number into every cell, you model the business in drivers: headcount by team, ACV by segment, churn rate, units shipped, price per unit. Lines such as payroll tax, benefits and sales commission derive from drivers automatically. Presenting the budget becomes easier because every number has a visible cause.

Formula engine. A spreadsheet-compatible formula language handles SUM, IF, nested logic, lookups across dimensions and time offsets. Formulas can be defined once at a parent level and inherited by every child, which eliminates the classic spreadsheet bug where one department forgets to copy the updated formula.

Planning templates. Ship department-specific templates with locked corporate lines, open input cells and validation rules. Templates guide non-finance owners through what they need to provide and reject impossible inputs at the source.

Versions, scenarios and what-if. Keep unlimited versions of the plan. Fork a version to test a hiring freeze or a pricing change, compare versions in split view, and promote any scenario to become the official plan with one action.

Workflow and collaboration

Submit, review, approve. The workflow engine routes department submissions to the right reviewer automatically. Reviewers can comment on any cell, request changes, or approve in bulk. A dashboard shows exactly who has submitted and who is blocking the calendar.

Comments and mentions. Every cell can carry a comment thread. Mention a colleague to ask a question without leaving the app; they receive a notification and can answer in context, keeping the full conversation attached to the number it concerns.

Audit history. Every change to every version is recorded: who changed what, when, and from which value to which value. Finance teams use the audit trail to answer board questions, to support internal controls, and to keep external auditors happy.

Read-only participation. Department owners can be given access to exactly the slices they need. The CFO can watch a live read-only view of the whole company during the submission window without touching anything.

Actuals and analysis

Actuals synchronization. Scheduled connectors pull actuals from NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero or Dynamics 365. Actuals map automatically to your accounts, so variance analysis always compares like with like.

Variance analysis. Budget versus actual, forecast versus actual, last forecast versus this forecast. Variance cards highlight the largest movements and the drivers behind them, with one-click drill-down to the source lines.

Rolling forecast engine. Roll the forecast forward monthly with configurable cadence, keep twelve months of forward visibility, and mark each forecast version clearly so the board always knows which one they are looking at.

What changed narratives. Owners attach a short narrative to material variances. The monthly readout then reads like a management summary — numbers plus explanations — instead of a spreadsheet someone has to interpret.

Consolidation and reporting

Multi-entity consolidation. Ownership structures, intercompany transactions, eliminations and minority interest handled natively. Consolidation is a defined process, not a manual scramble.

Multi-currency. Budget and report in any currency, with FX rates managed per version so you can freeze the rate assumption for the year or let it float.

Report designer. Build board-ready P&L, headcount, cash and KPI reports with drag-and-drop blocks. Reports refresh automatically and can be scheduled as PDF or Excel emails.

Excel export everywhere. Any grid, report or consolidated view exports to Excel with formatting and formulas preserved where it matters.

Platform and administration

Native desktop apps. Windows 10 and 11, macOS 12 and newer. Fast calculation on large models, offline work, native keyboard shortcuts and automatic background sync.

Role-based access control. Roles such as owner, editor, contributor and viewer can be scoped per entity, department or version. Access control follows the model, so a division controller never sees another division's salaries.

Single sign-on and MFA. SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect SSO with mandatory multi-factor authentication for Enterprise plans; TOTP two-factor for all plans.

API and data exchange. A documented REST API, SFTP drop folders and CSV import/export let your engineers connect Budgetaris to the rest of your stack — data warehouse, BI tool or custom dashboards.

Audit and compliance features. Immutable audit logs, exportable for compliance reviews. See the security page for the full list of certifications and controls.

What we deliberately do not build

Budgetaris is a planning and budgeting tool, not an accounting system. We do not replace your general ledger, payroll or billing. Actuals live in your ERP; Budgetaris reads them and plans forward from them. Keeping that boundary clear keeps the product simple, the implementation fast and the data ownership unambiguous.

Feature availability by plan

The complete feature matrix is published on the pricing page. In short: every plan includes the full planning engine, versions, variance analysis and reports. Workflow approvals, consolidations and integrations scale with the plan size, and Enterprise adds SSO, an SLA and a dedicated implementation manager.

If a feature you need is not listed, ask — the roadmap is driven by customer requests, and many of the features above started as a conversation with a B2B finance team. Contact us and we will tell you honestly whether it exists, when it ships, or how to work around it today.