Budget Planning & Forecast Workbench

The problem

Budget planning in Dynamics 365 Finance ships with real capability — planning processes, budget plan scenarios, worksheet templates in Excel, allocation methods and workflow. It also ships with real friction. Every planning cycle means reconfiguring stages, columns and templates. Budget owners open an Excel worksheet, lose the connection, rebuild it, and email a spreadsheet instead. Driver-based logic — headcount times average cost, units times rate, revenue times a percentage — lives in formulas inside that spreadsheet, invisible to finance and impossible to audit. And when the cycle turns into a rolling forecast, the whole thing is rebuilt from scratch because nothing knows how to roll forward.

The result is that the numbers in F&O are a snapshot of whatever was last uploaded, and the real forecast lives on someone's laptop.

What ECOSIRE builds

This is a build-to-order X++ extension package for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. It is not a download — we scope your planning model, quote a fixed price, and build the solution for delivery into your own LCS pipeline.

Driver-based planning templates

We build a driver model that sits in front of the budget plan lines. A driver is a named quantity with a time series — headcount, billable hours, units shipped, square metres, active subscribers — owned by a department and entered once. A template then defines how drivers become amounts: driver times rate, driver times rate times a seasonality profile, a percentage of another line, a fixed spread, or a growth curve applied to a baseline period.

Budget owners enter the driver, not the amount. The workbench computes the amount, shows the derivation, and writes it to the budget plan line against the correct main account and financial dimension set. When a rate changes centrally, every dependent line recalculates rather than requiring a new upload round.

Rolling forecast engine

We implement roll-forward as a first-class operation. A rolling forecast definition states its horizon (twelve months, four quarters, eighteen months), its actuals boundary, and its source scenario. Rolling the forecast pulls actuals from the ledger for closed periods, carries the remaining plan forward, extends the horizon by the required number of periods using the driver logic, and creates a new version — leaving the prior version intact for comparison. Actuals come from ledger balances filtered by the same main account and financial dimension combinations the plan uses, so plan-versus-actual is a like-for-like comparison rather than a mapping exercise.

Versioned scenarios and comparison

Every submission creates an immutable version stamped with the user, timestamp and stage. Scenarios — base case, upside, downside, reforecast, board-approved — are separate budget plan scenarios that can be compared column by column in a single grid: version against version, scenario against scenario, plan against actual, and plan against prior year. Variance columns are computed on the fly at whatever level of the account and dimension hierarchy you are viewing.

Submission, workflow and stage control

Submissions run on the native F&O workflow engine. A department owner submits, a cost-centre controller reviews, finance consolidates and approves. Work items land in the standard queue with standard delegation and escalation. A stage lock prevents editing once a plan has moved forward, with a controlled reopen that is logged. We ship configuration so that submission completeness — no blank required lines, no drivers left at zero, no lines outside the approved dimension set — is validated before the workflow can be submitted, rather than discovered three approvals later.

Entry surfaces that people will actually use

We build a grid-based entry workbench inside F&O with keyboard-friendly period entry, copy-across, spread and rounding helpers, inline notes on any cell, and attachment support for supporting schedules. Where teams insist on Excel, we support the Data management framework and OData round-trip so a worksheet can be exported, edited and reimported with validation on the way back in — with the driver logic reapplied server-side rather than trusted from the sheet.

Position and capital planning

Where in scope, we extend the driver model to position budgeting — planned headcount by position and start month, loaded with employer costs and benefit rates — and to capital planning, where a planned asset generates its own depreciation schedule into the operating forecast using your fixed asset depreciation profiles.

Integration and reporting

Approved plans write to budget register entries so the numbers are available to budget control and to financial reporting exactly as native plans are. Data entities cover drivers, templates, plan versions, scenarios and submission status, exposed through the Data management framework and OData for Power BI and for Power Platform approval or data-collection apps for contributors who do not hold an F&O licence.

Who this is for

FP&A teams running an annual budget plus a quarterly or monthly reforecast across multiple legal entities. Divisional finance business partners who own a cost centre budget and currently maintain it in a spreadsheet. Finance systems owners who have implemented budget planning in F&O and found the cycle-over-cycle reconfiguration cost higher than expected. Organisations that need an approval trail on the forecast, not just on the final budget.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We map your planning calendar, the legal entities in scope, your account and financial dimension structure, your driver set, the scenarios you maintain, your approval hierarchy and your F&O version. 2. Fixed quote. A written scope covering the driver model, templates, roll-forward rules, scenario set, workflow design and entry surfaces, with a fixed price and a delivery timeline. Changes are quoted separately. 3. Build. Development as X++ extensions in a dedicated model — extension classes, chain of command, event handlers, table and form extensions. No overlayering, so your One Version update cadence is unaffected. 4. Install in test. Deployment to your sandbox through your LCS pipeline or your Azure DevOps release pipeline. We load one real planning cycle with your data, run a full submit-approve-roll cycle, and tune the templates with your FP&A team. 5. Production. After sign-off, the same deployable package goes to production in your normal deployment window, with configuration steps, security assignments and a runbook. 6. Support. A defined support window after go-live for defect fixes and configuration questions, plus a compatibility check at your next platform update.

Typical lead time from signed quote to sandbox delivery is one working week, depending on the size of the driver model and the number of scenarios and entry surfaces in scope.

What this is not

It is not a general-purpose spreadsheet replacement and it does not maintain a second copy of your chart of accounts. It builds on the standard budget planning tables and budget register entries so that your reporting, budget control and consolidation continue to work the way they already do.