Budgets and forecasts play a crucial role in helping support the planning process within an organization and subsequently tracking the execution of that plan in the form of an actual vs. budget or actual vs. forecast.
The budget or forecast added to Payhawk is intended to be on a profit-and-loss basis rather than cash flow. You can also continue to add additional forecasts as you go through the fiscal year - for example, end of Q1, Q2 and Q3 re-forecasts.
Creating budgets
To create your budget:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Budgets.
Select the New > New fiscal year option from the drop-down button.
In the dialog that opens, select the expense fields (budget dimensions) that will apply to your budget.
The fields you select here will be reflected in the template file and they'll have their dedicated column in it. Also, all future forecasts will have these budget dimensions preselected and included in their template files.
Under Select a fiscal year, choose the month and year for your budget to be calculated.
Click on the link with the template file to download it.
Go to the Downloads folder of your device, open the file, and fill in the needed data.
When ready, go back to the Payhawk portal and, under Upload file, upload the template file with the filled budget data.
Click on Submit.
Updating budgets
To modify an already uploaded budget, you need to create a new forecast. Start by downloading the budget template file and making the necessary adjustments (for example, topping up €10K per month). Once you've updated the file, upload it to Payhawk as a new forecast.
After creating the new forecast, you can delete the old one if it's no longer needed. This process allows you to adjust your budget as required before the start of the fiscal year.
Deleting budgets
Deleting a budget will delete all forecast for the fiscal year:
Go to Budgets, click on the [Year] drop-down menu, and select Manage Fiscal Years.
In the dialog that opens, click on the Trash icon.
Next, click on Delete to confirm your choice.
Downloading existing budgets
Downloading an existing budget will retrieve both its predicted and actual spend.
To download an existing budget:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Budgets.
Select the desired budget and click on Download.
Breakdown of budgets
You can break down your budgets by dimension, depending on the defined budget dimensions:
Go to Budgets and select the desired budget or forecast.
Navigate to the Spent by section.
From the drop-down menu, choose the desired dimension to sort the information accordingly.
The template file
The template file contains two sheets:
The Template instructions sheet includes guidelines on what budget information you are expected to provide, what the allowed values are, and what their expected format is.
The Template sheet is where your actual budget data will reside. The information it contains will depend on the budget dimensions you have preselected before downloading the template file - apart from the common budget information, a column will be included for each budget dimension.
The common budget information you'll need to provide includes:
Budget name
Budget owners
Currency
Amounts for the budgeted periods
Budget hierarchy (if any)
Each row in the template file represents a single budget. To add multiple values for the same dimension within a budget, you have two options:
Duplicate the row, ensuring all data remains the same except for the dimension value.
Create a new row, keeping the same budget name and entering only the new dimension value, leaving the other columns empty.
Payhawk will automatically merge the data based on the budget name, associating all rows with the same budget. If merging fails due to incorrectly entered or missing information, the system will generate an error message for you to resolve.