Resources and guides for modern budgeting

This library collects what our FP&A specialists actually tell customers during onboarding: playbooks for common planning problems, a plain-language glossary, and answers to the questions finance teams ask us most. Everything here is free to read and share with your team. If a topic you need is missing, tell us and we will write it.

Playbooks

Building your first driver-based budget. Most spreadsheet budgets are built line by line, which is why they take three months and die in February. This playbook walks through the alternative: identify the ten to twenty drivers that actually move your business, build the model top-down from those drivers, and let headcount, revenue and opex flow from them. It includes a worked example of a B2B software company with fifty employees and the exact driver tree their FP&A lead used.

Running a rolling forecast without burning out the team. Moving from an annual budget to a rolling forecast fails when it becomes an annual exercise repeated monthly. The playbook explains the lightest workable cadence: which lines must be re-forecast each month, which can roll forward with a review, how to keep department owners engaged with narratives instead of spreadsheets, and how to stop the forecast from drifting into a second budget.

Presenting the budget to the board. Boards do not want pages of assumptions; they want a story with numbers attached. This playbook covers the ten slides that answer every board question about a B2B plan: the bridge from last year, the growth logic, the hiring plan and its cost, cash and runway, the sensitivity table and the two scenarios you actually believe. It includes language for explaining variance without defensiveness, because the board conversation is where finance teams earn trust.

Migrating from spreadsheet chaos. A practical, week-by-week migration plan for teams moving from Excel or Google Sheets to a structured tool. It covers the inventory of your existing workbooks, deciding which models deserve to live and which should die, mapping accounts and dimensions, cleaning actuals before import, and managing the human side — the department owner who loves their spreadsheet and is scared of losing it.

Glossary of terms we use

Actuals. The real, recorded financial results for a period, usually from your ERP or accounting system. Budgets compare against actuals to produce variance.

Bottom-up and top-down planning. Bottom-up planning collects detailed input from departments and rolls it up; top-down planning starts from a corporate target and allocates it down. Mature processes use both, iterating until the two meet.

Driver-based planning. A modeling approach where key business assumptions — headcount, pricing, churn, utilization — drive financial lines through formulas, so the plan updates when an assumption changes.

FP&A. Financial planning and analysis: the function that owns budgeting, forecasting and management reporting.

Rolling forecast. A forecast that always looks forward a fixed number of periods, refreshed on a cadence, instead of a once-a-year budget that ages as the year passes.

Scenario and what-if analysis. Testing alternative versions of the plan — faster growth, delayed hiring, price changes — to understand the range of outcomes before committing.

Variance. The difference between plan and actual (or forecast and actual), usually analyzed with explanations attached to material movements.

Version. A distinct snapshot of the plan, such as the board version, the stretch case or the Q3 forecast, that can be compared against other versions.

Frequently asked questions

How long does implementation really take? For a typical B2B company, a working pilot with real actuals takes one to two weeks, and the full annual planning process runs in the tool within one planning cycle. Enterprise migrations with consolidation are usually complete in two to four weeks of calendar time with our implementation manager.

Do we have to change our chart of accounts? No. Budgetaris maps to your existing chart of accounts. We recommend you plan at a level that matches how you manage the business, which is often slightly more aggregated than the GL.

Can our CFO see everything in real time? Yes, with a viewer role that spans the whole workspace. Many CFOs keep a read-only live view open during the submission window and watch completion progress without being able to change anything accidentally.

Is our data safe with a US-based vendor? Our security posture is described in detail on the security page: encryption, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, US data residency and no use of customer data for advertising or model training.

What if we outgrow our plan? You can move between plans at any time. Upgrades are prorated immediately; downgrades apply at the next renewal. There is no migration project when you grow — your workspace comes with you.

Do you provide training? Every plan includes access to the template library and recorded courses. Growth includes guided onboarding sessions, and Enterprise includes structured training for administrators, finance teams and department owners, plus quarterly business reviews.

The Budgetaris budgeting handbook

Customers often ask for a single document that captures our whole approach to B2B budgeting. The handbook combines the playbooks above with the model design principles we use in onboarding — how to structure dimensions, where to put drivers, how to handle intercompany and FX, and how to design a forecast the CFO will trust. Request a copy through the contact page and we will send it to your work email, free, no sales call attached.