Streamline your financial planning using Cube to build and compare scenarios, collaborate in real-time, and unlock faster, smarter decisions. In this article, learn best practices for using scenarios, such as how to:
- Establish a working forecast
- Lock scenarios for reporting purposes
- Actualize your working forecast
- Quickly build rolling forecasts
Before we jump into setting up your scenarios, let's take a second to break down the three ways we typically see scenarios being used.
Ways to use scenarios
Actuals Scenario
Actuals scenarios are write-protected and used to store Source System data reflecting the results for a given period. This can be General Ledger data (the most common) or Operational Metrics for businesses to help report different Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for their business.
When running an import from your source system, you'll likely select an actuals scenario. Learn more about imports.
Planning Scenario
Planning scenarios are used to store different versions of budgets and forecasts conducted by departments within the business. Finance will usually head up the planning process from a financial perspective, but will incorporate members from other departments to help forecast and plan financial and operational metrics
Learn more about how to budget collaboratively with Cube.
Locked Scenario
A locked scenario is blocked from publishing, so it becomes a point-in-time snapshot of an actuals/planning scenario. Locked scenarios are extremely helpful from a reporting perspective to conduct variance analysis and understand what happened to the results.
Learn more about write protection options.
⚡️New! AI Smart Forecast scenarios
Want to get a headstart on planning or compare trends against predictions from your historical data? Try out our new AI Smart Forecast engine and automatically create scenarios based on the data you have in Cube.
Learn more about AI Smart Forecasting.
Your various scenarios, which encompass your actuals, budgets, forecasts, and more, are neatly organized within Cube's Scenarios dimension. After they're created, fetch and publish your scenarios from the Spreadsheet add-on for more efficient data manipulation and reporting.
You can create as many scenarios as you need, as well as name and organize them in a way that works best for your team. Learn more about adding or maintaining scenario dimensions.
Best practices to maximize scenario planning
With many different capabilities for storing data, it’s critical to establish a routine for managing your scenarios to help influence your models and reports with the least amount of manual labor.
We see customers have the most success when they:
- Establish and routinely actualize a working forecast that combines their actuals and budget for the current year.
- Are in the habit of locking scenarios to ensure they won't change.
- Use the duplicate and merge functionality to quickly build new scenarios, such as rolling forecasts, using data from multiple sources.
Establish a working forecast
One of the most important things for managing an effective forecasting process is to have a consistent planning scenario. Pointing all of your templates at a single scenario, eliminates the manual intervention of changing the scenario name each time. The easiest way to establish a working forecast scenario would be to utilize a combination of actuals and budget for the current year.
How to create a working forecast scenario:
- From your Scenarios dimension page in the Web portal, click on the +Create button and then Scenario Merge.
- In the Destination Scenario dropdown, select Create New Scenario. Then type in the name for this scenario. We'll call ours Working Forecast.
- Next, we need to pull in our actuals data. This is where the merge comes in. In this example, we are planning on forecasting 2024. We already have two months of Actuals from our source system so we'll select Actuals for the Source Scenario and for the Date Range, select Custom Range to select Jan-24 to Feb-24.
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We already have a full year budget, too, and want to combine this budget into this Working Forecast. Click + Add another source. Select the budget scenario as the Source Scenario and enter Mar-24 to Dec-24 in the Date Range.
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Click Save to generate this new Working Forecast scenario. Cube will process the merge and send an email upon completion. At that point, this scenario is ready to fetch to our spreadsheet.
Lock scenarios for reporting purposes
Now that we have generated a working forecast, this scenario is ready to use for your planning and forecasting templates. After you have updated your templates and are finished making adjustments to the working forecast, this scenario should be locked to ensure it remains accurate for reporting purposes.
How to lock a scenario:
- From your Scenarios dimension page in the Web portal, find and click on the scenario.
- In the Write Protection dropdown, select Block to make sure no more adjustments can be made.
- Click Save.
Scenarios can always be unlocked later by changing the Write Protection settings back to ----- so you are always in control of who makes changes and when. An example of when you may need to unlock a scenario is when you're ready to actualize it with new data.
Actualize your working forecast
After actuals have been finalized for a month, its important to incorporate the new actuals into the updated Working Forecast. This will give you a new updated numbers for a full year forecast and allow for any updates needed. Below are the steps to incorporate Actuals into the Working Forecast:
- From your Scenarios dimension page in the Web portal, find and click on your working forecast scenario.
- In the Write Protection dropdown, select None to unblock the scenario and click Save.
- The dimension drawer will save and close. Then, refresh your browser tab.
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Click the +Create button, then Scenario Merge and select your working forecast in the Destination Scenario dropdown.
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Select Actuals for your Source Scenario and Mar-24 for the Date Range. You'll see a notice that says data may be overwritten for the time period selected. This is because you're replacing the existing data merged from your budget scenario with the actuals data instead.
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Click Save. Cube will send you an email when your merge is complete and your scenario is ready to use.
- Open the working forecast dimension and update the Write Protection settings to again block changes and Save.
This will kick off a process to merge the Actuals scenario into the working forecast for the Mar-24 period to produce a new updated forecast. Your working forecast should be actualized using these steps each month.
Quickly build rolling forecasts
Use the duplicate feature to quickly build rolling forecasts from your working forecast as you actualize it each month.
How to create a rolling forecast scenario:
Using our example working forecast scenario from earlier, we can easily create a 2+10 forecast.
- From your Scenarios dimension page in the Web portal, find and click on your working forecast scenario.
- Click in the Copy icon in top right hand corner to duplicate the working forecast.
- In this example, because we have two months of actuals and ten months of forecast, we will name this 2+10 Forecast.
- Click Save.
- Lock the scenario if you'd like to ensure no changes are made to it.
Use these steps to build a new forecast from your working forecast each month you update it with actuals data.
Explore more planning and reporting possibilities in our video library. You can also use templates to get started quickly.