Budget at the ledger’s granularity
Account plus entity, department, location, and project — the same dimensions actuals carry, so comparison needs no mapping and no maintenance.
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Seven seconds from inbox to a balanced journal entry, with the policy check and the approval gate shown in full.
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A parallel ledger that reconciles to your existing system every morning — to the penny, per account, per period.
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Consolidated reporting in eleven days, without leaving the accounting system they already ran.
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Most budget-versus-actual reporting fails for a boring reason: the budget was built at a different granularity than the ledger records. Budgeted by department, actuals coded by account only — so the comparison requires a mapping somebody maintains, and the variance is arguable rather than useful.
What it does
Account plus entity, department, location, and project — the same dimensions actuals carry, so comparison needs no mapping and no maintenance.
Department heads enter their own numbers within a scope you set, with a submission deadline and a consolidated view of who has not submitted.
Updated from actuals as periods close and from committed cost, contracted revenue, and payroll — rather than being a static annual number nobody revisits by March.
Not a percentage. The specific transactions and drivers responsible, ranked by contribution, with timing effects separated from real movement.
A hiring plan, a lost account, a price change, a delayed project — modelled against the real cost base rather than as a percentage haircut on last year.
Payroll modelled per role and per start date rather than as a monthly total, because for most companies at this size labour is the budget.
A budget built in a spreadsheet by department and a ledger that codes only to account cannot be compared without a mapping. Somebody maintains that mapping, it changes when the organization does, and the variance report inherits every judgement in it.
The consequence is that budget variance stops being trusted, which means it stops being used, which means the budget becomes an annual ritual rather than a management tool. Fixing it is not a reporting problem — it is capturing dimensions at the transaction so both sides speak the same language.
For most service and software businesses between $10M and $150M, labour is the majority of cost, and budgeting it as a monthly total loses the two things that matter: which roles and when they start.
Modelling per role with a start date makes the budget respond correctly to a delayed hire — which is the most common real variance and the one a monthly-total budget handles worst. It also makes the hiring conversation quantitative rather than a negotiation about a lump sum.
A rolling forecast is only better than an annual budget if it updates from something real. Ours pulls closed actuals, committed cost from open purchase orders, contracted revenue from agreements, and payroll from the plan — so the forward view moves when the business does rather than when somebody re-forecasts.
Where an input is an assumption rather than a fact, it is labelled as one. A forecast presented as a single confident line hides exactly the information needed to judge it.
Limits
Driver-based models with complex allocations, workforce planning at scale, and consolidation modelling across dozens of entities belong in a dedicated planning tool. We cover budgeting and rolling forecast for the mid-market.
Variance against a number set to satisfy a board rather than to reflect a plan is arithmetic against a fiction. The analysis will be correct and useless.
Budgeting by department only works if actuals carry department. Where they do not, the fix is at the point of entry and no budgeting tool substitutes for it.
Questions
Tell us how you budget today and we will show you what comparable actuals would take.