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Webinar
Date & Time
Thursday, July 23, 2026
EDT: 2:00 PM | PDT: 11:00 AM
Duration
45 minutes
Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining. We're gonna get started in just a couple minutes to let a few more folks trickle in, and then we'll dive in shortly. I see a couple more people joining. So we'll just give it one more minute and then get started. We lost your share there, Lauren. Okay. Perfect. This is you know, seems like a good time to get started as well. So let me just reshare that screen. Alright. Looks like we've got a great group here so far, so let's go ahead and get started. Welcome, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar. Today, we're gonna be talking about budget season in the AI era and how to build a plan that holds up all year. So before we jump in, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. So first is our live q and a. You're probably gonna have a lot of questions throughout the presentation. There is a q and a button up down at the bottom of your screen, so please feel free to put in all of your questions there. We also have Taylor, one of our here, to answer them in the chat throughout the presentation, and we'll also have some time reserved at the end for the live q and a in case we don't get to them in the chat. Next is the recording. Everything you see here today is being recorded, and you are going to receive a copy of the recording as well as some additional resources in an email following the webinar. To walk us through it, I'm thrilled to welcome back Jim Bullis, our VP of solutions here at Cube. Some of you were with us last time Jim presented, so it's great to have him back. Jim has been at Cube for nearly five years and leads our presales, implementation, and support teams. Jim, over to you. Fantastic. Yeah. Excited to spend an hour with everybody. Definitely wanna shout out Taylor. She's one of our best resources, helps out tons of our customers with this exact topic, budgeting, forecasting, everything else that comes into it. Quick background on myself. I've been helping folks like yourselves with budgeting processes for the last fifteen years just through general consulting, implementing a lot of legacy solutions out there in the space, like your Adaptive, your TM ones of the world back in the day. But been here at Cube for five years as I mentioned. I think I'm sharing the wrong screen, aren't I? Let me just go ahead and make sure I'm sharing the right one. Alright. Perfect. Alright. So what we're gonna cover today? It's gonna be kinda split into two halves. First half's gonna be covering, you know, just general pro tips around the budget. Right? How AI is impacting how folks budget and how it can really amplify yours your process. I always like to talk about zero based budgeting. It's the topic that comes up a lot in certain organizations, but it's interesting to fold in, talk around, you know, stand alone AI versus bringing in FP and A platforms. And then second half, I'll do a live demo. So if you're a current Cube customer, definitely tune in for that. I'll showcase some of the capabilities that we have to jump start your process as you start to look towards budget season coming up depending on your fiscal year, of course. If you're new to Cube, I'll give you a good kind of overview of how Cube can, you know, uplevel your budgeting if you're exploring, you know, FP and A platforms, AgenTeq AI platforms, so on and so forth. So we'll jump in. We'll start just kinda philosophically talk about how I break down the bread budget cycle, especially when it comes to the time consuming parts for finance. First step is prepping. Right? Lot of customers of ours, you know, before joining Cube, take weeks to prep up their cycles, build their templates, pull all the actuals, so on and so forth. Then there's the collaboration. Right? I send out templates, gather feedback from team members, work with them on, you know, crafting their budgets. Then the finance team has to collect those, aggregate those, super manual, super time consuming. And then finally, it's not done there. Then you do pass two, pass three, pass four, until you finalize. So we're gonna kinda break down each area, talk about some pro tips for each, how AI can come into the fold, whether or not you have a platform like Cube, but that's gonna be the structure kind of the first part here. So when we talk about prep, right, it's setting the foundation before you go send things out to your team. It's usually really time consuming. But as we think about the whole process here, really important that you start with that top down mindset. Right? You're gonna you know, the budget is the exercise where you build that bottom up. But if you don't have a good perspective from a top down of what you wanna do, you're just kinda building a Wild West budget that's kinda based off the takes of everybody across the organization. You really wanna collaborate as, like, an executive team or with those executive stakeholders to build that top down before you go ahead and start to execute that so you have something to measure against. Definitely recommend prepopulating what we call, like, the keeping the lights on cost, the things that are known. You know, that's gonna be rents, you know, even payroll. Like, you're gonna flex. You know? Do I hire five people or ten? But your your current staff, you generally have a good idea of, like, what their total burden cost looks like, their salary, so on and so forth. So the more you can prepopulate and keep those things consistent versus just doing, you know, regular increases, That's gonna help you out there. And then this one's really important. It's kinda overlooked when it comes to gathering all the numbers, but establish a rigid and realistic calendar for the team. That starts with the tip on the right, which is to hold a formal kickoff where you kind of reacquaint everybody. There's probably new department heads, so on and so forth with the budget process. But communication is key in these cycles. It's like anything. If you're running a project, think of a budget as a project. The more you communicate upfront, the easier things are as you go through the process. So establish those kickoff dates, do a training, talk about first passes, approvals, whatever it is that's part of your process. The more you can communicate what that looks like, the less confusion, the less, like, leeway you have to give folks for not turning it in on time. So highly recommend schedule that kickoff, build a rigid calendar that your team can work against so you're not, like, scraping this you know, get things together the last couple days of the budget cycle there. Now there's prep. How does AI factor into prep nowadays? Right? So I think the biggest one here, if you're not doing this already, use AI to help create that baseline. Now when I say baseline, that means that first pass of the budget, Ideally, you're not just giving your team blank slates to start with. Right? You have some vision that's informing an initial plan. They can go ahead and make adjustments to it and changes and request things, but using AI, like, hey. Go look at my historical data for this department based on seasonality trends, the growth rates. Go create what you think a budget might be. You're probably gonna tweak that, but it's gonna go ahead and, you know, give you that better starting point than maybe you would have had otherwise. So if you haven't, start exploring, okay. What how can AI help me create that first pass of the plan before my team goes and reacts to it? Second is data health and anomaly detection. Use AI to look through your historicals because if you're using it to project forward, maybe there's some big event that happened that was a one off last year. Right? Maybe something happened in February. Maybe the Super Bowl was in the town of, like, one of your locations. Right? That's an anomaly that's not gonna happen this year. Use AI to help detect that so you can remove those one offs for your plan so you're building a good first pass out out in front. Third is to kinda create a centralized assumption register. That's so you can kinda have those strategic guidelines that your team can work against. So using AI to gather, like, what's going on in the market can help inform your plan and to make sure it's not off. Like, if something's happening out there and you're not accounting for that, that's a miss. Right? So if you can bring those things in, use AI to help there as well. So tons of areas where AI can help during that prep process. Alright. So, again, thinking about our stages, we had prep. We're you know, good pro tips there. Collaboration's the next one. Right? We send out our team templates. We're working with our team members, helping them make their updates. First off, sometimes it can be tough for finance folks, but your department heads, your branch managers, the folks that are the stakeholders who are contributing to your budget don't always know all the finance jargon. So do your best to work in language that works for them. It's gonna make it easier for you to collaborate with those folks. A lot of customers I've worked with in the past, you know, suffered from that user or lose it mindset. You know, this is gonna be up to your business, but reward man managers for being honest, it's gonna make it a more collaborative experience and more realistic if you're actually hey. You're not being penalized for not using your whole budget, or you're not being rewarded for you spending money on, you know, on areas you shouldn't be spending money on just to, like, make sure I get my full budget next year. So if you can work to collaborate to kinda eliminate that mindset, that's huge from a collaboration standpoint and huge from up leveling your budget process. Lastly, this one I think is probably the most important, which is coach your team on how to work with you. So as you all know from running budget cycles, they're gonna come and request a lot of stuff, and the default answer is probably no. Train them on how to ask you for budget. Right? It's not just I need fifty grand. You can see on the right here. We need fifty grand because we're planning on hiring four new AEs. All those AEs travel twice a month, and it costs roughly x for the travel. So we need an extra fifty k in travel budget this this year coming up because of that. Right? So you're gonna ask those why questions anyway, or maybe just say no depending on your personality. But if you can train them to answer those first two or three questions for you, it's gonna make your process faster because you're not gonna have that back and forth. It's gonna make them think more deliberately about their plan and the numbers they're presenting back to you. So highly recommend, especially as part of that kickoff or just through interactions with them, teach them how they should interact with finance, especially, in the budget round. Right. So bringing AI into the fold when it comes to that collaboration, how does AI help there? Right? If you have data in AI or access to your historical data, now your team can ask questions to AI. Whether that's you wanna give that department head that access or they ask you a question, you just type it into AI. They're always asking random questions. Give me the last fifteen months of my spend. Alright? That's a random time frame. Usually, we've been able to push back on that and give them the last twelve or spent a bunch of extra time pulling together that fifteen month outlook. Now you can just ask it if you have that data accessible via via via AI. So it's gonna help from that perspective in terms of collaborating on that front. The next two, it's gonna give your team guidance. Maybe they're exceeding certain thresholds. You can have AI sweep through and and flag those. You can also automate your manual workflow processes of sending out the templates daily. You have a platform like Kube, but you don't need to, But sending out reminders, things like that. Like, make your life easier when it comes to collaborating with your team members. If you can arm them with more information, if you can give them better communication and alerts, use AI to help you from that perspective. Alright. The dreaded period, which is I sent out all these templates. Now I have to collect them. My team members broke my Excel file, so it takes me an extra hour to go ahead and put that together. It it's terrible. Make it easier on yourself where you can. So we call it, like, dummy dummy proofing the process as much as you can. If you have a FP and A platform like Cube that becomes exponentially easier, if you're still doing things in spreadsheets, that's okay for this session as well. But go ahead and preempt those problems that might happen. Lock those cells that require that don't require inputs that are not messing with those. Use drop downs, things like that to make it more intuitive. Use color coding. Right? Maybe the cells that they're supposed to input show up as white. Everything else is in blue. Whatever it might be from that perspective, super important there. Using good naming conventions, this is gonna help across the board. If you don't want people just, again, going wild west and tagging v three JD edits like they have in this example here, go ahead, create some structure around your process, some good naming conventions. The last one I think here is really important as well, which is create some sort of materiality threshold. The example here on the right is, hey. Five thousand bucks. Don't go crazy chasing down things that are less than that. Maybe for your business, that's a thousand. Maybe it's fifty thousand. Whatever it might be, Like, spend your time in the most impactful areas. That's probably gonna be headcount, maybe some of your big contracts, so on and so forth. Don't get all hung up on small dollar amounts. I've seen a lot of folks that make that mistake in the past and really burn a lot of their time when they're not focusing on those bigger picture discussions. So create some sort of materiality threshold where you just, you know, don't go nuts over it. But you can also, you know, express some of those thresholds to your team. Right? Like, hey. We're gonna actively flag for you anything that you request over five thousand over last year or whatever it is. Like, build those into the process and help set some guidelines, but also make sure you're not burning yourself up from that perspective. Alright. Lastly, we create a budget. Great. Now we need to iterate on it and finalize it. Right? The first pass is usually a lot of, you know, very aspirational requests from your team. It's natural you're gonna trim that down, work with the CFO, the executive team to, like, really finalize what that looks like. Some recommendations here as well. No surprises for the department heads. Right? It's natural. Everybody's requesting everything. You're gonna cut dollars. You don't want them to find out in a month that you cut their budget by twenty percent. Right? That should be a discussion you have with them right as it's happening. Obviously, you don't wanna do it, like, super early when you're not sure what it's gonna land on. But there as soon as you know what's happening, we don't wanna surprise folks. It makes them not feel bought into the process. The more you can incorporate them and communicate, the better. The three c's here, check for completeness. Right? Pivot things, double check that y'all your departments are accounted for. You're not missing anything. Consistency, make sure that it the data that's being projected is consistent with your historical actuals. Obviously, your business is gonna ebb and flow and grow and, you know, shrink in certain areas. Just make sure there's no big outliers there. And then finally, the last c here is connect. We wanna make sure that our plan is connected to the CEO CEO's goal. So that's where it's important we mentioned at the front, do that tops down plan. As you build that bottoms up, you should kinda have those, you circling each other and getting closer because the last thing you want is something that is, you know, way off from what, you know, the executive team originally put together. It should be kind of working together to build that, you know, most realistic plan that you can have. Another one that people kinda they're usually exhausted by the end of budget time frame, and the last thing I wanna do is is think about it anymore. But build it as a part of your put in your calendar, your cadence, your playbook that you have for running your budget. Do a quick postmortem. It doesn't have anything anything big, but anybody who's involved in the process, send out a quick survey. It could be via Google Form, something like that. But, you know, what had worked, what was confusing, what can we do next time to make it better. It's amazing the kind of feedback you get from your stakeholders if you just go ask for it. So it's always good to kinda run a postmortem on your process to get things going. And then, obviously, within the budget, you're iterating, you're doing v two, v three, v four. Use this as a jumping off point to start that continual rolling forecast. Like, everybody wants to. It seems daunting. If you again, if you have a platform like EAP, it makes it easier. But if you can start building that cadence, it makes folks more bought in throughout the rest of the year. Alright. So I kinda broke down the stages there. The prep, the collaboration with your team, the collection of your data and aggregate aggregating it, aggregating it, and then finally iterating and finalizing on it. Now I just have some kind of generic generic or not generic generic. General pro tips, that we can kinda focus on to, you know, maybe boost certain parts of your process here that aren't necessarily tagged to those four areas. So here's the six that we'll run through. The first two is always start with headcount planning. You know, every business is a little bit different. Some are ninety percent headcount. Or some their expenses are made up, like, ninety percent headcount. Some it's less depending on, like, how capital intensive you are and if you're, you know, manufacturing things. But for most businesses, this is a huge chunk of cash. It's usually gonna influence the rest of your spend for your budget. Start there. Get it as accurate as you can. The good thing about it is usually you can be pretty precise based on the people you have in that plan. A lot of p's in that sentence, but you know what your insurance costs are. You know what it looks like for a fully burdened employee. You you know what their salaries are today. It might be variable in terms of how many folks you're planning on hiring during the upcoming year, but it's you can get it pretty accurate. So start there before you get everything else going on. Next is standardizing your hierarchies, before you start building your business logic. What this means is if you're bringing in data from your ERP or your CRM, your HRIS system, sometimes those codes are different across those systems. Like, maybe in my g l's, I call marketing three hundred dash marketing, but in my HRIS system, it's just called m a MKT or whatever it might be. Now you wanna synchronize those names so everything makes sense. That's what a platform like Cube does in the back end for you. But if you don't have it, again, make sure that is a step in your process. Hey. As I'm bringing this data together, sync up these names, make sure everything is ready to go. Alright. When it comes to collaborating, the rule of kind of three options is obviously is gonna be dependent on who you're interacting with, but people are gonna come ask, and you're gonna probably say, no. Can't do that. Frame it up more as there are trade offs to what you're asking for. Right? So right now, our plan is to, in this example, cut a hundred k in software, but we're gonna keep our head count. Okay. You you want a different path. Are you gonna are you okay delaying the the new hires so we can keep the software? Or are you okay, sales manager, with increasing your goals, your output, like, by fifteen percent so we can keep the software and the people? Right? Frame it up as, hey. There's some trade off here that we're looking for. Like, make sure, like, you're not just saying no, that you're collaborating with these folks and getting them to buy into the plan and some of the trade offs that are made versus just, like, a blanket note. And then number four here, we wanna banish copy paste syndromes. What this means is we want people to be thoughtful about their plan. We're not trying to set things up that there's copy pasting last year into next year, increasing it by some certain percent. Right? We have drivers logic that is inherent in the way that we plan and operate. As an example, maybe for every new hire we have, there's gonna be two k in, training expenses or whatever, or we send them to the home office. There's a two thousand dollar trip there. You can build in this logic, so it's not just people copying and pasting numbers forward and saying, yep. That looks good. Right? Bring logic into the fold where you can to really make sure that your your plan is, again, more precise there versus, hey. If we're holding heads you know, hiring steady, I don't need all that training and travel budget for those new hires like we had this last year. Alright. Really important one. It goes back to the communication as well as create kind of baseline SLAs for late submissions. This is one of the biggest headaches I've seen working with finance departments is, hey. The due date's the twenty fourth. People are turning in the twenty seventh, twenty eighth, twenty ninth. Right? Upfront, set consequences. I think that's a big factor here is, hey. If you're not submitted on time, your budget's gonna be this next year. It's gonna be the same as last year, whatever it is. Right? So if people don't have consequences, they're not gonna you know, they're gonna react accordingly and and milk the timeline, submit changes last minute, make your life really tough. If you can be more forthright and upfront about that and set some expectations, you'd be amazed at least what percent just adhere to your timeline because you stated it and put some basic consequences out there. You're always gonna have those few on the team, but don't let the few become many just because you're not being diligent around those submission processes. So do your best. Again, overcommunicate, from that perspective. And then this one's really important as well. We do not want our stakeholders to be engaged in the budget only at the budget time frame. Right? Create BVAs, actual versus budget feedback loops so people can see their budget in action. You're giving them access to their actuals so they can better run their department, their business unit, whatever. If they have insight there, it's gonna make them more engaged when it comes to the budget time frame because they realize how it's being used throughout the the the year. So I see that as a mistake a lot of organizations make is these stakeholders only touch the budget in a couple months. They're not engaged with it the rest of the year. So give them those windows into their performance as a team, because they may adjust their strategy based on those actuals that are flowing through. Alright. I'd like to touch on this real quick, before we get in the demo in a couple minutes. Zero based budgeting, great topic. The key here is when does zero based budgeting make sense? I don't think this is just my opinion that all organizations should be doing this every year. If you're thinking about it, when are when are good time frames? One, you're making a major strategic prop pivot. Maybe you were going you're super growth oriented. Now you're taking a step back and repositioning and saying, okay. We're gonna aim for profitability this year. Right? That's a major change in how you approach the market. Maybe you're not spending as much in marketing, so on and so forth. And I should actually preface it. For those who don't know, zero based budget is basically I'm sending out a blank budget to start. Like, we were talking about before about prepopulating it with last year's actuals, whatever it might be. Zero basis, I'm just sending out a template. So for making a major strategic pivot, good time to do a zero based plan. We're being, you know, constrained around cash, great time to, like, really be thoughtful about every expenditure that you have. Obviously, if you're acquiring somebody or you just did a act acquisition, that's a good time to, like, reset and, like, look at all of your and say, what do we actually need and build it up that way. The other one is just if you got, we'll call it, like, budget squatter, somebody that's just last year plus five percent every year. Not a great, like, business process to be operating that way. So if you need, like, a reset, hey. Let's actually go through and build up your plan line by line as opposed to just, you know, copy paste in plus five percent. Right? So some areas where this works really well, like because it doesn't have to be all or nothing from this perspective. Right? I'll start on the right. What are some places where you don't really usually need this? Headcount, got a roster. It's pretty set. You're just more adding new employees, and there's kinda that zero based discussion from that standpoint. There's obviously areas of the business that are more locked in, your leases, your insurance, things like that. Don't waste your time on that front. Basic image structure that runs the business, maybe some audit fees, things like that that are mandatory. Where is it most impactful? That's gonna be the areas where it's more variable, like software and SaaS stacks. Obviously, a big one there to kind of validate, hey. Where are we actually getting value? Travel entertainment, marketing ad spend, professional services, consultants, so on and so forth. So, again, there might be tactical areas within the business that you wanna do this. But one thing I think is really compelling, I've seen some successful customers do this, is have, like, a rotating zero based plan, like, just to avoid that kind of squatter mentality. Hey. Every year, we're doing two different departments that are building it up from the ground up. And maybe the first year in sales and marketing, they get off the next couple years in terms of that thorough zero based aspect from that perspective. Or, again, maybe it's certain categories. Hey. Across the whole business, software spend is being evaluated this year, travel entertainment. Like, everything else will kinda precede from that perspective. Alright. Last item here is pulling back in AI. A lot of folks are saying, hey. Can I build x process with the AI on my own, or is it better to, you know, go look at a platform? So AI is fantastic. If you're like me, use it every day. What's it really great at? Right? It's drafting narratives, building decks, maybe some reports, things like that. Off single datasets, it's really great. Where does it start to break down? Right? Data governance, audit trails doesn't have any of that stuff. It's really unclear who did what. It's not great with multidimensional structures, building in lots of business logic that kinda inherently is locked in place, things of that nature, that's where an FP and A platform is gonna come in. And you can layer AI on top of that to really expedite everything you're doing. You're you when you have an FP and A platform like Cube, you're building that central source of truth to serve that agentic AI layer. So you have your ERP, your CRM, your HRIS all coming together, and all that data is mapped and synchronized. So when AI is sitting on top of it, it's not guessing that mappings are hallucinating. You never have to worry about it calculating anything wrong because, you know, that platform is doing the calculations for you. You have audit trails, role based security. So when I send something to marketing, I know only marketing can see this. That's a huge risk if you're doing everything manually from that perspective. And I can see the exact changes folks made. When you're dealing just with, like, a LLM, it's layers upon layers of prompts, and it makes it really hard to look like, visibly see what's going on with that model. So something to think about there. Like, AI brings a lot of benefit, but we're still seeing budgeting, reforecasting, collaboration with your team. Much better to have an engine underneath to help you there. Alright. So we'll get into a live demo of Cube here. So, again, if you're an existing Cube customer, hopefully, we highlight some functionality that maybe you haven't seen before and see how you can, like, boost your prep, collaboration, your collection. If you're new to Cube, welcome. Hopefully, you like what you see because it'll fold in you know, we'll mainly be doing a a budget exercise. Obviously, with Cube, we can do tons of reporting, dashboarding. I'll I'll show you some of the cool AI things we can do on top of it. But real quick, Cube here, what you'll see as we go through and what I wanna highlight is I've used a lot of the legacy platforms in the space. What really sticks out to me about Cube is we lead the market in ease of use and user friendliness and the ability for you to maintain your own models. That was a huge nightmare. Tons of consultants required really convoluted coding and a lot of the other platforms I used. Cube, as I run through it, you're gonna see it looks really easy, really intuitive. That is because we're founded by Christina Ross, who is a three time CFO, got really frustrated implementing a lot of the legacy solutions out there. So everything that we've built has been built for finance to make it easy for finance. And as AI is coming to the fold, thankfully, everything we've done makes it really easy to layer AI on top and exponentially kinda boost everything else you're you're doing, and that's because of our our data model. So we embrace the best data aspects of all the platforms out there. So multidimensional, we're synchronizing everything together. We're building all your business hierarchies in the system. We have your business logic, relational databases. We have head count rosters. Maybe it's just a big list of your contracts or your pipeline that you need to pivot and work with from that perspective. And we have this fantastic AI layer built on top of it. So as you start to interact and use AI, it's not hallucinating. It's amplifying you from that perspective. So to touch on some of the AI that you'll see today, we call our super agent Charlie, who's basically communicating and working with all of our other agents. But we break this down across kind of what we call the four, you know, areas of finance needs, which is data management. So Cube's AI is helping you map, bulk edit your dimensions as they come through to make sure you're not missing anything, No big anomalies, anything like that. When it comes to analysis, this is really a superpower here. Right? I can ask questions. It's gonna surface insights that I might not have seen on my own. Really cool stuff. The stuff that I've been waiting for, which is AI planning using your history to go ahead and generate statistically driven forecasts. Just, hey. I need a new plan. I want you to cut spend by five percent in this area, held it steady in this area, let AI do the heavy lifting so you don't have to spend days running new cycles. And finally, using AI to help collaborate, whether it be, like, building new visualizations, using MCP down there at the bottom, like, Claude, ChatGPT connectivity to build vor decks, whatever it might be. So as I go through, we have tons of agents working throughout, but, you know, we kinda have our super agent running on top to help everything from that perspective. So before the demo here, this is how it works. Right smack dab in the middle, this is our agentic finance layer that is cube where we're synchronizing all your data. So whatever is important to your business, we can connect to and bring it in. Traditionally, for finance teams, that's a lot of GL data. Could be CRM data, HRIS data. Maybe you have an operational data warehouse, billing systems. Whatever it is, we can bring that in, synchronize it so AI can really read it. But what's really different about Cube and what I really love in terms of, like, the ease of use and why we continue to get these really high scores is what you see on the right. So we are gonna meet your team where they like to work. So if it's the head of marketing, they don't like spreadsheets, great. You don't have to send them a spreadsheet. You can send them a link to our our website, our key workspace. They can go just follow the link, enter their numbers, hit publish, and be done. They can look at their dashboards or the reports up there. But we have a lot of stakeholders that like to work in other areas. Maybe you're in finance and you love working in spreadsheets. Great. You can go ahead and view reports there, publish back from spreadsheets. Maybe your team uses Slack or Teams to collaborate, and you wanna ask questions if your data there. You can go ahead and ask a question of your data in Slack or Teams. And then finally, if everybody's using Cloud or chatty JPT or Copilot, whatever it is, you wanna go and interact with your data, maybe update a plan from there. So Cube lives in all these environments. We live in your PowerPoint decks, your g slide decks. We connect to Power BI. Wherever your team likes to work, we're not trying to disrupt your workflows and force you into one specific website. Is gonna meet that team where they work, and it's all gonna be governed and have accurate data because of that agenda finance layer. So as we go through, if you haven't already been asking questions, fire those in. Taylor will ask, answer them as they come through. Otherwise, we'll do some q and a at the end. But we're gonna go ahead and do our live demo now. So what I'm gonna do is pull this up and just get my notes here. Alright. So what I'm looking at here is our cube workspace. So we have that agentic finance layer. This is our UI that kinda lives and allows you to kinda run your imports, integrations, things like that. I'm looking at a report, and we're gonna go update our budget. I have another budget that I can compare it to. Qube is generating these values for me. So if I just come back to this and, you know, pop back into that report, right, I'll come to my department of variance report. So I'll be able to make some updates, come back here, and see the impact of my changes immediately. Now to back up and to go to our theme for the presentation, which is what are the steps of the budget. Right? The steps are I have to prepare all my data. I send it out and collaborate with my team. I collect it, and then I iterate on it. Before I can prepare, I have Cube integrated in my source systems. I just showed that on my flow diagram on the left. Right? So if I come in here, all my core important data sources, I'm integrated with. So in this case, I've got NetSuite, Sage Intact, Salesforce, maybe it's Bamboo, Paylocity. I have Snowflake. Whatever metrics are important for me to run my budget, we can bring those in. Now Cube is synchronizing that data, mapping it all together. Every night, for example, it's loading an actual, so I have fresh data to react to when it comes to doing my BVA reports, so on and so forth. But really important, and this, again, was working for AI kinda breaks down on its own, is it doesn't have that synchronized governed data layer. So I've integrated everything. I have my actuals flowing in, and then Cube can use that data to help build my plan. So I mentioned before, right, I have, you know, to create a plan. So a lot of you might have a template that looks like this that you send out to your team. And today, it's an Excel or g sheets or whatever it might be. Hey. Here's all my expense lines. This one's for the marketing department. Maybe I'm giving them current year actuals and forecast. I have my budget columns out to the right, But you'll notice this is empty right now. How do I get data in here? If I don't have Cube, this is a super painful manual process. It takes me weeks to pull all the data together, create an initial projection for my team to work with. We take those weeks of time and melt that down into minutes for you. So I'll show you what that looks like. We have two kind of mechanisms that, you know, based on how you wanna go ahead and, you know, execute your cycle, you can use. The first is I'm gonna go create a new budget so I can come up here, create a new scenario, just call it budget. But right next to it, we have something called smart forecast. So what this does is all that great actual data we've pulled in from NetSuite or Sage Intacct, whatever it might be, we can use that to build a statistically driven plan based on your growth rates, your seasonality, all your trends in your data. So I can say, hey. Go update my budget, for example. And if I'm budgeting for twenty twenty seven, I would go ahead and pick that time frame. Right? I'd pick January, go out to December. My source is almost always gonna be actuals. I wanna use my actual data we've loaded in. That's why we brought it in. And then I can pick how far back I wanna go. You know, usually, you want at least two or three years to kinda get those seasonality built in. But maybe if you had, like, a weird year a couple years ago, you exclude that. I pick create smart forecast, and Cube goes ahead and builds that plan for me. Right? So it's using just the historical data I have in my model to create a projection forward. The other one that we have and if you're a current Cube customer, you're see that might not see this yet because it's coming out. It's in bay beta right now. If you wanna explore the beta, you can reach out. We're opening up the beta next week, but it should be live within a month or so. Sorry to product that I'm overcommitting there. But, yeah, I'll show you what it looks like here. I ran a new plan yesterday. Basically, you can just prompt it. So this also comes you know, this is great for starting a plan, but it's great for iterating on your plan. Because maybe you finish your budget, and you're like, you know what? Run me I could just type in here. Run me a new cycle or cutting, you know, marketing spend by five percent, increasing revenue by two percent, and Cube goes and does all the math for you via AI in the back. So yesterday, I was playing with this, and I just prompted it. I said, hey. Take my actuals, and I just did a really basic one to start from June of twenty five through May of twenty six. Push those forward in the same month in twenty twenty seven. Increase everything by side seven percent. Right? He went through and did that. You can see it it gives you all the data used for that analysis. He'll, like, give you the updates, kinda talk about the impact, give you an overview of what happened, so on and so forth. But really cool because, again, this is great for preceding your plan or iterating on it because you're gonna get that feedback. You know what? Cut this by three percent, whatever it is. Normally, you have to go back, spend hours or days rerunning your model from the bottoms up. Kube is basically going to the bottom, doing it for you there, and running with it. So really cool. Use AI to precede that plan. And then from there, I can go ahead and pull up that template that I have in my spreadsheet if I wanna work there. Cube is gonna populate those values for me. So this is the other thing that, you know, again, takes tons of time is getting the right number in the right cell. That is very tedious nonvalue add work. I am in Excel right now. Everything I do in Excel works the same in g Sheets if you're a g Sheets firm. But all I have to do is turn on my Cube sidebar up here on the right in my spreadsheet. I hit fetch, and now Cube is gonna populate that fresh budget I created either via the planner agent or my smart forecast. It's also got last year's or current year actuals and forecast. But all that time, I used to spend getting the numbers in the right spot. That melts away, and now I can use that to collaborate with my team. Last quick note, you don't have to do this, but I highly recommend it in terms of running your cycles, is within my workspace here, I'm gonna go to scenarios. And I always save off a copy of that budget before I start collaborating with my team. You can call out whatever you want. Here, I called it budget v one. If you wanna call it original budget, budget baseline, something like that. But when you have a platform, save that off because that way you can do what I'm about to do is go make updates and immediately see the impact compared to my original plan versus, like, somebody asked you, hey. What changed this plan to the last plan? I I don't know. Right? I'd also recommend that as you go through your budget cycle, just save off a copy every week. Super easy to do that. All I did is you can go up here to duplicate. Say, hey. I wanna make a copy of my budget. I'm gonna call it if I was saving it off tomorrow, budget July twenty fourth. That way, when inevitably somebody asks you what changed between this week and last week, you just pull up last week's budget. You can just nest those next to each other and see the impact right away. So, again, you don't have to do that. I highly recommend it. And then you can get rid of those, you know, one off weekly versions at the end of your cycle, because you really don't need them anymore at that point. Alright. So we've done all the prep work. Right? Mentioned that before. We're gonna keeps gonna save you weeks of time in your prep for your budget cycle. Now I need to get this out to my team. I had an Excel file I just showed. I could send that out if I like that. My team is used to it. They like working Excel. I trust them. Great. A lot of times you don't necessarily. There's those less savvy users. We have workflows built into Cube that are gonna allow you to facilitate that cycle. So first off, it's just gonna save you time sending out emails. But if I come here to my annual budget cycle workflow, I can log in to Cube. It's gonna show me everything I have assigned to me. When this gets set up, I, as a department head, if I'm the head of marketing, get an email alert saying, hey. Budget season started. Here's a link to your budget. Go in and make your updates. Yeah. I can come in and see the due date. I can see the status. So when I'm done, I can mark it complete. That way, as the finance head, you can come in and see who's actually worked and completed their plan. But, otherwise, I can come in and go ahead and open up this workflow. And that same template I was working within a spreadsheet, I have that available here in my workflow area so I can come in and make those updates. Now I'm acting like the head of marketing, so this pulled in the head of sales. You can see I have, like, eighteen headcount here. I'm just gonna refresh this, pulling my marketing data. But now I can make this a really seamless experience for my team where they can, you know, easily come in, follow the process here. Again, I'm gonna come in here and just make a basic update. Maybe I'm gonna add some telecom expense inside of this facilities and rent area. So we'll just, you know, update five thousand, whatever I wanna do here. Drag that across. Let me just make sure I I went all the way. Yep. So really easy for my team. They can't break anything. Again, there's less spreadsheet savvy folks. They can just go ahead, enter their numbers, hit publish. Now those updates are being booked into the budget. And if I come out of here actually, let me just open up a new view here because I'll probably come back to that screen. And if I'm hanging out and I'm the head of finance and I wanna see how the process is going, I can I don't actually remember what number I typed in, so I'll see you in a second because alright? My new budget is forty thousand dollars higher. I'm showing it as negative because, you know, increases the budget I don't like. You can have whatever sign flip you want on there. But my new budget compared to my original budget increased by forty percent or forty thousand dollars. So cool. Again, web input. I mentioned before at the onset. Our goal is to meet you where you wanna work. Right? So if that's in the web, great. If you're somebody that likes working in spreadsheets, I'll come back here. You can send that same thing out. So and, there's no one, you know, inherent connection from a spreadsheet to the the web on its own. I hit fetch. Here comes that five thousand I just made an update to in the web. Maybe I wanna do this in Excel or g sheets. Hey. Let's change this to forty five hundred. I can go ahead and hit publish here. Same thing. It's sending that data back into the database. So now my that input is live. The other great thing about this is, normally, if you're running a cycle just in Excel or g Sheets, you have no idea what's going on in terms of the process. You don't know how far people are in terms of, like, going ahead and making updates. I can go ahead and see all these updates in real time. So I can see yep. This should change. Again, I don't know what number it should be. We'll see in a second. Thirty six thousand for the marketing department. Alright. So we inputted in the web. Awesome for that group of users. We have our more set spreadsheet savvy users. I just made an update there. What's great is I can use spreadsheet formulas, things like that to make up my updates. Today, everybody else is working in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot. Maybe I wanna make a change from there. So I'm gonna go open up Claude. And I was kinda playing with this before and say, my update updating update my utilities expense or marketing or budget twenty twenty seven by fifteen percent or just the US, g co US. Right? So I'm not even typing the number. I don't know what that is. I can just go ahead and tell Claude because Claude is connected via our MCP to my cube data, and I can turn this on. So it's saying, hey. Right now, looks like it's fifteen thousand every month. This is gonna bring it up to seventeen two five. Sorry if it's too small on your screen to read that. I just went ahead and did that. And now I can go ahead and come back to my spreadsheet and go ahead and refresh this. So this marketing or this utilities expense should change. There you go. So I, as the head of finance, am working in Claude. I might not give that ability to everybody because I wanna be a little bit more tactical in terms of it. But, again, Cube is meeting where you where you want to work. Is that in the web? Is that in Claude? ChatGPT Copilot? Is that in the spreadsheet? The key is there's one agentic finance layer that's storing and governing all this data and allowing you to update this in real time. So super cool from that perspective. Now if I wanna see all the changes that I've been making, I can come in here, and we'll just go look at, you know, one of these. I'll look at this change. I think this is the manual change where I decreased it from five thousand to yeah. There we go. So it's telling me on July twenty third at one forty four central time. Jim made a change. He updated telecom for May for budget for marketing. It was five thousand. Now it's forty five hundred. Where was he? He was in Excel when he made that change. So every single update you make is tracked and logged. Again, if you're just doing this with AI and some without a platform like Cube, you lose that audit trail that, you know, transparency around what's happening with your data. So really cool being able to track everything from that perspective. Lastly, a question we get from a lot of our customers is, hey. How do I, you know, work with notes and comments right within the workflow area? Your team can go in and make updates and, you know, comments, so added telecom expense. Right? I can take people in it so they can review it. And now I have that full thread, the logic behind what's going on in terms of, you know, making those commentary updates, those notes for my team. You can also do that kind of an audit trails, things of that nature. Alright. So we prepped our data. We got all of our data in our templates. We just collaborated. We got our gathered our inputs from our team. We wanna see the outputs of those changes. Right? Couple ways we can do that. I have this first view here where I was looking at it in a web report where I can come in. I can see, okay. The marketing team is the only one that's been in there. They're making updates. Same thing. Maybe I wanna go view a variance report down in my spreadsheet. Right? So this is more of an account by account view. So I've made some updates. I can come in and kinda see those changes here as it comes through here. So let me just refresh this and update this view. So I think most of my changes were down here in, you know, facilities and rent. So I can see those changes. But I can use AI to interact with this as well. So the first area I'm gonna look at is within myCUBE workspace. I can ask a question, just analyze my budget for twenty twenty seven, break it down by department. Right. So this is probably just gonna run through, generate some insights for me that maybe I didn't have. I can also interact again going back to that theme of we wanna meet you where you work. A lot of folks like to work in Slack. They like to work in Teams. You can ask a question to Cube via that interface. So I can say, what is my revenue budget for q one twenty seven broken down by product. Something like that. Right? If I naturally like to work in Teams or Slack, I can just ask a question there. Keep a spit back the answer to me in any of these interfaces. Also works in Claude. You saw me making updates from Claude. I can ask the same types questions of Claude as well. So it's really kind of up to you in terms of, hey. Where do you like to interact? Because maybe you're getting questions from your team. Hey. What was my spend last month? You just type it to queue. It will respond back to you, and then you'll get that that validation there. So here comes that breakdown, that I had. It's giving you, like, key insights, write ups, trying to interpret your data. But Cube also provides all the evidence that you used because when it comes to data, like, you need to trust the outputs and the analysis. Cube is giving you the outputs and the analysis so you can double check it right here without having to go run a bunch of analysis on its own. So you can see here we've got a breakdown there. If I come back to Slack, you can see it's generated a bunch of replies for me where it's breaking down my revenue by product for q one for twenty twenty seven. So, again, trying to meet you where you like to work. Is that Slack or Teams? Is that your AI platform of choice, Cloud, Chat, GPT, ColaPilot? Is it spreadsheets? When you're in finance, you're probably using a mix of all the above. If you're just a normal department stakeholder, you're probably limiting it to something to make it really easy and intuitive for them. It's probably that link to the workflows, so on and so forth. Alright. So we've done some analysis on our data. Lastly, to wrap things up before I take some questions, again, best practices, once you're finished with the plan, you're gonna lock it down so I can come to my budget here and go flip my right protection to blocked. This will restrict users from making inputs to your plan, but allows you to, like, still view it. So once you finalize in your budget, usually set it to that. You might go remove some of those, like, weekly snapshots you took. But, again, most likely, you're going to your planner agents after you did maybe your first pass. You're prompting that and saying, hey. Cut this by five percent. Increase this by three percent. And instead of you doing all that manual legwork, you're letting AI rip through and run all that data for you. So, finally, once you have all your budget complete, I mentioned it before, start to run your BVAs. You can have your reports that you put out to your team every month. Now they can come here and access their BVA. They don't you don't have to manually send all files. They can come view a report. The other thing is it's usually really daunting to run reforecasts. Right? We just talked about how much time it takes you today to generate a budget, to prep for it, to collect it, to analyze it, to iterate on it. With Cube, all that goes away, all that manual work. And you can run, like, a one plus eleven right away in the year by using this merge scenarios button up here. Because what this will do, it'll actualize your plans for you. So you'd make a copy of your budget, call it, reforecast, something like that. Then Keap's just gonna ask you, where what do you wanna update? So for me, that would be my reforecast. What do you wanna use? It's always actuals. And then if it was, like, the first month of the year, let's say we're in January, I just say, take that reforecast, which is a copy of my budget, update January with my actuals, and then, like, two or three clicks, I have a fresh forecast that's ready to go so I can start, you know, reforecasting my data. That way my budget just doesn't die and become super stale. It's a living, breathing thing throughout the year as we get new inputs and actuals flowing in because they're all connected to Cube. I can see the impact, make changes accordingly. Again, we have a lot of customers that when they join Cube, they only do a budget. But now that they have Cube, they start doing a quarterly forecast, a monthly forecast, you know, get up to that gold standard of doing doing a twelve, eighteen month, twenty four month rolling forecast because it's not so daunting. Cube is sitting there generating these values for you, running these new scenarios, so on and so forth. So I'll wrap up there so we can have some time for q and a. But, hopefully, you had some nuggets, that you learned, from my pro tip section. Otherwise, for those, you know, existing Cube customers, hopefully, you saw some capabilities that are can help you run your cycle more effectively. Or if you're new, welcome, and, hopefully, Cube can be a a good fit for your organization as well. But, Taylor, Lauren, I'll open it up to you. Were there any kinda lingering questions that we think we should tackle? Yeah. Some yeah. I know we have a couple minutes left, so we definitely have time for a few questions. Thanks, Jim, for the great presentation. The first question is, what's the single most common mistake you see teams make when they kick off budget season? I think I referred to it in the deck, but I think it's just poor communication and expectation setting because and you always pay the price at the end of it. Like, you can create a first pass with the budget. It may or may not be, like, spot on, but that that you can change throughout. Like, wrangling the fifteen, twenty department heads that you need to collaborate is half the battle just managing the humans in the process. So I'd say not setting good expectations up front, not having a good calendar just makes it really lot more daunting to work with those folks and kinda manage your cycle. Like, if you can get out in front of it, everything goes more smoothly as we go. Awesome. Thank you. Our second question is, what does a good hybrid approach look like in practice, and where do teams usually get it wrong? I'm gonna make a guess and say that's probably about the zero based budgeting kind of process. I would say a good hybrid approach is think about each expense line. You don't need to get super detailed. You can do it by category. But what are those items that even if you want to probably aren't changing rents? Like, lock those in. Don't spend tons of time. Like, maybe if you are getting a new office or something like that, that would factor in. But don't spend your time zero based budgeting the whole thing. Go ahead and do the most impactful areas where you have the most control over the spend areas like software, consultant fees, things like that. So I would say what I've seen be really successful is that approach of, like, here's the core three areas that every department is building up from, like, bottoms up versus kinda locked in. Although I was excited by those more disciplined teams who do, like, whole departments every on some sort of cycle. Like, this year at sales and marketing, let's build that up to get really diligent about how this team is operating. And then, you know, the next couple years, it's a little bit more status quo for those folks. Oh, I'm on mute. Awesome. Last question. If you could get every finance team to change one habit before next budget season, what would it be? That's a great question. I would say gonna be a cheesy one, but bite the bullet and buy cube so you don't have to do all this stuff manually anymore. That's a terrible habit of having to use spreadsheet. So, you know, check out cube if you wanna learn more. If you don't have it, you know, we'll we'll do a more custom demo for you every year use cases and specific business. Perfect. So we're coming up on time, so let's make that our last one. Jim, thanks again, and thanks to everybody who joined and sent in those questions. Just two quick things before you go. Keep an eye out on your inbox. I'll send the recording and those resources shortly. And if any other questions come up on later, feel free to reply to that email, and we can respond to you there. Also, if you'd like to see Cube run a planning cycle with your own data, feel free to book a demo. I'll put the link in the chat here. And everybody have a great rest of your day. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you.
Every finance team is bringing AI into budget season. Almost none of them can trust what it gives back. AI can be 80% right, and in finance that's 100% wrong. This webinar covers the tactics that make a budget hold up all year, then shows how Cube runs your planning cycle with autonomous FP&Agents on clean, decision-ready data. Whether you're an analyst building the model or a CFO defending it to the board, you'll leave with tips you can use on your next cycle. We'll cover:
Budget Fundamentals That Hold Up All Year
The practical habits that separate a budget people actually use from one that's stale by Q2. Setting driver-based assumptions, building in scenario room, and keeping ownership with the department heads who spend the money. The fundamentals matter more than ever now, because AI built on a shaky budget just gets you to the wrong answer faster.
Zero-Based vs. Prepopulated: Pick the Right Approach
Two ways to start a budget, two very different outcomes. We'll break down when to build from zero and justify every line, when to prepopulate from prior actuals and adjust, and how to run a hybrid that gets you the rigor of zero-based without the three-month slog.
Set Up Your Budget on a Layer Your AI Can Trust
See how Cube's Workflows, Planning Inputs, and Web Templates turn budget setup from a spreadsheet scramble into a structured, repeatable process. Push templates out to every department head, collect inputs in the tools they already work in, and pull it all back into one clean, decision-ready layer that's ready for both your team and every AI tool they use.
Run the Cycle with FP&Agents
Watch the agents do the heavy lifting. The Planner Agent builds forward-looking models from natural language, Smart Forecast turns historical patterns into a defensible baseline, and Smart Variance explains what moved and why, before anyone asks. This is what budget season looks like when the manual work runs itself.
Extend Your Budget to Your Whole AI Stack
Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini to your budget data through the Cube MCP Server in under two minutes. Every stakeholder queries the same clean numbers, and every answer traces back to the transaction. No code. No consultants. No IT lift.
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