Dynamics 365 Business Central: Budgets And Forecasts Part 1

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Budgets and Forecasts Part 1

Hey, everyone, we're going to keep going with BC. Today, we're going to switch pace, get out of CRM for a little bit, and go into forecast and budgeting. I know that's probably something you were thinking about two months ago at the end of the year. It's the beginning of the year, but it's a fun topic. We decided to pick it up and get into it.

I'm going to explore some really cool aspects of Business Central with forecasting. It's all called, budget, for some reason, not forecasting. I like the word forecasting better, but it's budget. We take it as it is. Let's talk a little bit about the structure.

When we have Business Central, we have budget, and I'm going to say this is item budget. What is an item budget? An item budget is a forecast as well, quantities and amounts that you're going to be selling. If this is a sales item budget that you're going to be selling of a particular item, item group, or something like that.

Then we have, as you're familiar with, we have the ILEs, which are the item ledger entries, which is the actual transactional data. If we do sales item budgets and ILEs together, or we put them together, we can put them together into something called a sales budget analysis. We'll just call it sales analysis. That's very similar to the analysis views. The analysis views work with finance, but the sales analysis actually work with items. Therefore, you can go into quantities and stuff like that. Let's take a look at the system and show – see how it works.

Okay, so we're going to dive into the forecasting, budgeting analysis and all that now. I feel like Business Central, or NAV, or Navision if you go all the way back to that level, started out with the account schedules. That was great. Then analysis views came along with dimensions. Now, we're spinning more into that area with things like sales budgets, purchase budgets, sales analysis reports, inventory analysis, and stuff like that. That's basically what we're going to dive into more, those areas.

To start out with, we have to take a moment, and think about these, and really understand that this is mostly based on dimensions. Dimensions is a very powerful concept in Business Central. Just quickly, I'm going to go here into general ledger setup, where we set up the main dimensions. I have whole videos about dimensions, so if you're not sure what that is, you can definitely watch those.

We have set up the global dimensions to be department and customer group right here. That is important because I don't have to specify that in – for example, in the budget. It's already counted in as the main dimension. If I'm creating a new budget, or something that's dependent on dimensions, if it's a global dimension it's already there. I just have to add in the extra dimensions. They are the most important dimensions of the system.

With that, if I go into, for example, sales budgets. I'm going to create a sales budget right now. I go into new. Just create a coffee mug budget, S budget, so coffee mug sales budget. Here, if I actually try to select the customer group, I'd get an error. It's already part of the global dimension. I don't want to do that. I do want more dimensions than just the customer group. I'd like to have region in there and also item group. I have, basically, the customer group, the region, and the item group that I'm doing a sales budget for.

If I close out of here, and get into my sales budget, and hit edit budget. The sales budget is like a sales forecast. Again, I think in a previous video I laughed about this as well. Budget, you normally think about budget in finance. Forecast, you think about forecast in sales. Forecast is a more positive term. Budget is we have to stay within budget. Forecast, we've got to beat the forecast. They decided to call this budget for some reason. That's fine.

Here, we have, as lines, the item. We are counting quantity in the cells right here. Periods are across. This is 2019 all the way out. Why don't we just go to 2020 since we are there already? I can start going ahead and saying how much we are going to sell of the iNECTA coffee mug in 2020. Now, since I have dimensions here like customer group, and region, and item group, etcetera, I could actually set up a region. I'm going to just talk about the northeast. I can say a customer group. I'm going to talk about small.

Once I fix these, if I put in the number now, let's say we're going to do 500 coffee mugs in January, 550 in February, 600 in March. Then summer is coming along, so we go a little bit down, right, so 350, 300, we've got to get into the cold brew at that point, 200. I'd say 100 in July, 100, 150, and we go up again, up to 300 in September, 400 in October, and then we have the seasons. We're going to do maybe 700 there. Now I have this. This is the budget, or the forecast, however you want to look at it, for the INECTA coffee mug for the year 2020 for northeast, small.

Now, if I want to do, let's say, a different region – actually, let's just do a different customer group. Let's do that and stay within the northeast. We'll go into medium. If I select that, you can see it disappears out. Let's say medium is a bit higher. That's 1,000, 1,100, and 1,200. We'll get it to stay at 1,200. Then we go down to 800, 700, 600, stay at 600, then 650, 700, and then 900, and then we'll do something great here, 1,500. Now, if I take away the customer group filter, you'll see that it actually sums it up. If I drill into these numbers, you can see there are two entries done. Those entries are 1,500. You can see it's medium small. That's pretty much it to set up the sales budget.