Product tour

The Budgetaris Desktop workspace is a structured planning environment that behaves like a well-designed application, not like a grid of cells you have to tame. This tour walks through the main areas you will use across a typical planning cycle.

One workspace, three layers

Every Budgetaris deployment is organized in three layers. The model layer holds your accounts, drivers, formulas and versions. The workflow layer handles who contributes what, and in which order. The reporting layer turns approved numbers into board packs, variance decks and export files. You can work in all three layers from a single desktop window, switching context with keyboard shortcuts or the navigator sidebar.

The model layer is where finance teams feel at home. Accounts are organized in a chart of accounts that maps to your general ledger. Drivers are first-class citizens: a headcount driver can feed payroll, benefits, equipment and office space lines at once, so changing one assumption updates everything downstream. Formulas behave like spreadsheet formulas — SUM, IF, lookups — but they run against structured dimensions, which means a formula written for one department can be applied to all departments without copy-paste errors.

Versions and what-if scenarios

Budgetaris keeps every version of your plan as a first-class object. The current year plan, the stretch case, the board version, the latest forecast — each lives side by side with a clear label, owner and timestamp. You can compare versions side by side, roll a scenario forward, or fork a version to test an idea without touching the official numbers.

What-if analysis is a core workflow rather than an afterthought. Build a scenario where hiring is delayed by one quarter, or where average contract value grows five percent slower, and see the effect on headcount cost, cash burn and EBITDA instantly. Because scenarios are cheap to create, finance teams stop avoiding the question "what if we are wrong?" — which is exactly the question a good budget exists to answer.

The planning cycle, step by step

A typical annual cycle in Budgetaris runs like this. First, the FP&A lead publishes the planning structure: which departments participate, which templates they must complete, and which drivers are locked at corporate level. Department owners then open Budgetaris Desktop, fill in their templates with guided prompts — headcount plans, opex requests, revenue outlooks — and submit.

Submissions land in a review queue. Controllers and the FP&A team review each submission with comments and version history, send items back with notes, or approve them. Once everything is approved, consolidation runs automatically. Intercompany lines net out, eliminations post, and the executive view rolls up by entity, region or department with no manual work.

The same machinery runs the rolling forecast. Every month, actuals synchronize from your ERP, the model rolls forward, and variance analysis highlights the lines that moved. Narrative fields let each owner explain the movement in their own words, so the forecast readout tells a story instead of presenting a puzzle.

Consolidation and eliminations

Multi-entity B2B groups often budget each subsidiary in its own spreadsheet and then struggle to combine them. Budgetaris handles ownership percentages, intercompany transactions and eliminations natively. You define the group structure once; consolidation is then a button, not a four-week project. Minority interest and FX translation rules follow standard accounting treatments and can be configured to match your group policy.

Reports, exports and board packs

Reporting starts where planning ends. Budgetaris ships with a report designer for P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, headcount and KPI packs. Reports update automatically when the underlying model changes, so the version in the board deck always matches the version that was approved. Export to Excel, PDF or CSV is available everywhere, and scheduled reports can be emailed as attachments to a distribution list each morning.

Integrations and data exchange

Budgetaris Desktop imports and exports through secure connectors. Most customers connect their ERP or accounting system — NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero and Dynamics 365 are the most common — to pull actuals on a schedule. You can also exchange data through SFTP folders, a REST API, or plain CSV files for legacy systems. A secure Excel add-in lets contributors work inside Excel when their process demands it, while the audit trail still records every write-back.

Deployment and support

Deployment is intentionally simple. Each user installs the desktop app on Windows 10/11 or macOS 12 and later, signs in with their company account, and their workspace, permissions and models follow them. Data synchronizes through our US-hosted infrastructure with end-to-end encryption in transit and at rest.

Every plan includes onboarding help and email support from our Denver office during Mountain Time business hours. Growth and Enterprise plans add a named implementation manager, a three-week structured migration, and priority response times. We also run a free monthly masterclass where new teams can ask questions of our FP&A specialists.

Ready to see it on your own numbers?

The fastest way to evaluate Budgetaris is a live walkthrough on a screen share, using a model that looks like yours. Book a session — it takes thirty minutes, and there is no obligation. You can also compare plans and pricing or read about security and compliance if that is your first question.