Budget - How the pieces fit
dashboard.salesmatrix.com builds a budget from your own trading history rather than a blank spreadsheet. It reads the last 12 months of actuals, learns the seasonal pattern, and spreads a 12-month budget across that shape. You then adjust what you want and compare against actuals as the year runs.
Five screens, in the order you meet them:
| Screen | Where | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Create Budget | Budget | Generate the year in one pass, with optional what-if and monthly shaping. |
| Edit Budget | Budget | Adjust the budget once it exists — cell by cell, or a whole group at a time by its total. Also where rows are deleted or joined together. |
| Budget Report | Budget | Budget against actuals, by rep, customer, product or category. Also where one budget is compared against another and a draft is adopted. |
| Compare Scenarios | Budget | Two budgets side by side for the whole year — plan against plan, rather than plan against actuals. |
| Budget Progress | Budget | Month-to-date and year-to-date position against plan. |
A financial year holds one Active budget — the one every report, favourite and dashboard widget reads — and any number of Drafts beside it. A draft is a complete alternative budget for the same year: build one to try a 5% uplift, a reorganised territory or a pricing change without touching the number the business is working to. When a draft turns out to be the better plan, adopt it and its figures replace the Active budget's.
Everything below works the same whether or not you use drafts. Where your system has not had scenarios switched on, the scenario controls simply do not appear and each year has a single budget, exactly as before.
Budget sits behind two separate gates. It is a subscription option: where your account does not include it, the whole Budget group is absent from the menu for everyone, rather than appearing and failing. It is also governed by your access level — a Sales Rep sees the Dashboard and Dynamic Reports, while Budget needs Manager or Administrator. An administrator can change a colleague's level on the Users page; changing what the subscription includes is done by Salesmatrix.
Every budget screen works to the financial year set by your company's balance month — the last month of your financial year. A June balance month means budget years run July to June, and the year is pre-selected for you throughout. Nothing here assumes January.