Castaway Budget Versions

Castaway provides users with 3 different data layers or budget versions. It’s critical for you to understand the different budget versions that are available and what they are so that you are able to manage these versions well. The management of these budgets is important to enable you to perform the variance analysis that best suits your objective.

You can identify what budget version of the report you are viewing by navigating to the right-hand side of your reports and clicking on the drop-down arrow of the Report On text box.

Projected report

The projected report is the live layer of data that reports your most current sets of values. It will include your Opening and Actuals data (if any) and the latest values from your data entry screens of each element (e.g. Sales or Costs elements)

Original Budget

The Original Budget is the budget that is created when you first Enable Actuals in your file i.e. the original numbers that you have forecasted for. For many users, the Original Budget is the company’s official annual budget. It is locked in at the moment of creation and will not be affected by any changes in your Actuals, Projected, or Revised Budget data.

Revised Budget (optional)

The Revised Budget is the budget that is created when you choose to Create a Revised Budget via Forecast > Opening & Actuals Data. This budget file is essentially a snapshot of your Projected file the moment you click on the Create Revised Budget button. Users would typically create a revised budget to save a new budget version of their reforecasted numbers when they feel that trading conditions/forecast assumptions have changed enough to make the Original Budget irrelevant.

Updating your Original or Revised Budget

You can choose to update your Revised and/or Original Budget at any point in time by going to Forecast > Opening & Actuals > Update Revised/Original Budget.

When you do so, Castaway essentially takes an exact copy of your Projected report and saves it as the new Revised/Original Budget. The important thing to note here is that Castaway only ever has a single version of the Original and Revised Budget saved in your file. If you choose to update either report, be aware that you are overriding the old data with the new ones.

A good habit here is to create a backup copy of your file before updating your budget reports. You can learn to do so HERE.