Video Transcription
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for planning with Qube, our budgeting session.
Before we get started, I'm just gonna go over a couple of housekeeping items. So the first item we have here is the live q and a. So throughout this session, you're probably gonna have a lot of questions. There is a q and a button down below.
Feel free to drop your questions in there throughout the webinar. We have a few of our Cuber's ready to answer your questions. And if we don't get to it during the webinar, we're gonna have ten minutes reserved at the end specifically for q and a, possibly a little bit more if we go over. So, yeah, feel free to drop them down there.
We'll be sure to get to them. Next is the recording of slides. Everything you see here today is being recorded, and you're going to receive an email following the webinar with the recording of the webinar itself as well as the slide deck that you'll be seeing throughout the presentation.
So be sure to keep an eye out for that. Speaking of things to keep an eye out for in your inbox, we're also gonna be sending you a survey. This survey is just asking you questions about what you thought of today's webinar, what you think of our webinars in general, and asking you questions about if there are any topics you'd like to see in the future. This is gonna help us create better content for you, so we'd love for you to fill that out when you get a chance.
Fourth is our office hours. So we do have the live q and a reserved at the end here today. But if you have more questions and wanna talk through things a little bit more, we're going to have office hours tomorrow at two PM Eastern time specifically for this group. So there is going to be a link at the end of this presentation for you to sign up for that as well as in your email. So keep an eye out for that. And lastly, many of you when you signed up for this know that this is part of a three part workshop series.
Planning with Qube is made up of our budgeting session. Next, we'll be forecasting on October ninth, followed by advanced planning on October twenty third. So if you haven't signed up for the other two, I highly recommend you do that. There will be a link at the end of this presentation for you to do that as well as in your email.
So without further ado, I am going to hand things off to our presenter for the day, Jim.
Jim, floor is yours.
Awesome.
Yeah. Good to good to chat with everybody today. If I haven't met you, happy to meet you here virtually.
Just my background, I've been here at Qube for about three years. But Before that, I spent over a decade in FP and A Consulting. I used to implement Hyperioness Base, TM one, and then, headed up the adaptive practice over at the consulting shop I was at. So I helped hundreds of customers like yourself get fired up with budgeting, forecasting processes, so on and so forth. So excited to walk you through the content today.
Whether you're somebody who's been using Qube for a couple years and doing, you know, budgets and forecasts and all that good stuff or a brand new customer who's just gonna start off their budget cycle, Hopefully, you find some content that's helpful. But we're gonna just walk through, like, hey. What are the basics of getting cubes stood up for your budgeting process? So couple key items I'm gonna touch on.
First, we're gonna say, how do we even, like, get a dataset there, like an initial budget to get going? So we'll walk through you know, let's precede that budget. We'll talk about creating templates, give you some tips, tricks there. When we get to our third session, we'll do even more advanced pro tips around your template creation.
Then, ultimately, okay. We've created a budget. We've created some templates. Let's how do we go and get these out to the team?
So some different options there. Finally, how you manage the overall workflow and scenarios of your process, and then finalizing your plan, and then any kind of pro tips and questions we might have at the end. So I'm going to steal the screen.
Let me see here.
Alright.
Looks like it should be sharing.
Let me know if it's not. But where we're gonna start, let me just get things situated here, is, like I said, we're gonna start with seeding your initial budget. So what does that mean? That means getting an initial copy of the budget out. Usually, you're gonna do this as a finance team before you start distributing your templates out to the rest of the organization.
Right? So let's give our team that first pass so they have something to react to. Right? You might do a zero based budgeting process, which is great if you're running that, but most companies, hey.
Let's give somebody something to react to. Lots of different options there. First one I wanna highlight, and I'll show you a quick preview of it, is Qube's AI kinda smart forecasting feature. So to create a initial pass to your budget, sometimes it's good just, hey.
Let the computer run the historical numbers through our algorithms and spit out a forecast based on your history. Right? That could be a really good way to create those first twelve months of your budget to run with it from there. Let's say you don't wanna do that.
Right? You wanna do it, you know, maybe moral fashion way. Great. That works too. First off, if you are doing rolling forecasting, of course, right, you would have, you know, or what in September, at least eight months of twenty twenty five already created if you're doing a rolling twelve.
So, obviously, that's a great starting point. Hey. We already have a plan for the first eight months. So for those more mature organizations that are doing regular rolling forecasting, obviously, this becomes easier because you're just trying to populate those last four months of the plan.
But a lot of customers, not gonna have that. Right? You might just have, like, a current year forecast or maybe even your current year budget that you've actualized with Q.
If you haven't, go check out the merge scenarios functionality. You can just take your budget and merge in or actualize that budget based on, you know, actuals through September or August depending on where we're falling in the month. But yeah. Hey. Take your current forecast. Just push it forward a year so we have something to react to that's somewhat realistic.
Maybe you don't have a forecast. Another good option is let's take your trailing twelve months of actuals and use that as our starting point. We can just push it forward again so you have something to start with that you know, obviously, it's the actuals from the last twelve months, so it should be pretty reflective of how a specific department line item might, be manifesting itself in your itself in your new budget or at least as a starting point. So I'll actually show you example, like, I have to get that process going up.
So we'll start with one and four and show you examples of those in a second here. And then finally, maybe you do zero based budgeting. Again, that's great process too. Obviously, you don't need to precede it.
You just fire up a new scenario, with Qube, and then you have a empty plan that you can start reacting to. So let's go look at that, how we do that in Qube, a couple of these options. So I'm gonna go here. And where I'm at is I'm in our Qube web portal, and I've clicked on my scenario section.
And you've noticed we got tons of scenarios in here that I've been playing with. You know, I've had this environment for a while, so I have, you know, multiple final copies of my previous budgets in here. But if we wanted to do that item number one, letting Qube create your first budget based on history, where you're gonna find that is in the upper right, and we have a smart forecast option.
And you can click on that. And, basically, you're gonna say, hey. Where do I wanna fill in so I could go, you know, choose my budget here, for example, and what accounts do I want? Maybe I only wanna do my operating expenses.
Maybe I only wanna do this for revenue. I'll just leave it set for all. And I'm gonna go populate my new budget year so I can go in here and say, hey. I wanna go populate, you know, January through December.
So that's my target. That's what I'm aiming to create. Down here is where it's coming from. Right?
So I could use my actuals or maybe my forecast. If I wanna go use my current year forecast, I could say, hey. Go pull in just twenty twenty four, my current forecast and use that. But as you see, there's a note here.
Hey. If you have more data than that, helps the algorithm produce a better forecast the more data you pump through it. So, ideally, maybe, hey. I wanna go back and use, like we'll ignore twenty twenty since we all know what happened, with COVID and whatnot there, and we'll use a more stable starting point, January twenty one through September twenty four, whatever it might be.
Right? But now Qube Qube's gonna take that data, run it through algorithm, create a new budget for you as that starting point. So that's a really good technique to, like, fire it up. Again, if you wanna just use something like a trailing twelve months, I'm gonna show you a kind of a a quick hack to do that as well.
So I have a blank spreadsheet, and what I'm gonna do is turn on queue. And what I'm trying to find is basically every intersection of anytime a department and account intersect each other via actual so I can make sure I accommodate in my plan. So what I'm gonna do actually is just type in I get I'm gonna do my operating expense budget right now. So I'm gonna type in operating expenses.
And if you haven't seen this, this is really cool. We rolled it out this year. We have new suffixes. I just typed in t twelve m.
That's basically saying take July. That's my last full actual period in this model. Yours is probably August. And go back the last twelve months and summarize that.
So and I'll just tell it I want to. So I'm not even using Qube to build this. I just said, hey. I typed it in.
Now Qube's gonna go ping that, and you can see it's got my scenario, my time period, all of my operating expenses. I'll fetch that into my report.
So over the last twelve full months of actuals, I got twenty three million dollars, and I'm just gonna hit drill down. So when I hit drill down, it's gonna pull back. In this model, I have departments, entities, products, markets, things like that. It's pulling back every single transaction that hits this.
Now we're not trying to plan by every single transaction. What I'm actually gonna do is go wipe out some of these columns. But this is essentially giving me all of my intersections of data, and then I'll do a quick remove dupes up here. And it removed it from, you know, ten thousand transactions down to two hundred and sixty eight unique combos that I need to plan going forward.
Right?
So I can go ahead and remove my filter. I'll add this in real quick. And what I'm gonna do is I already kinda got this started over here, is I have, you know, my twelve months of actuals. So now I can just tell Qube, hey. I actually wanna go fetch these intersections of data in, and this will pull in every single actual for the last twelve months. So I make sure I have everything accounted for. I can go ahead and fetch this in and boom.
In a second here. I said boom too early.
We'll let it flow in. But I've got twenty are my actuals through July of this year, August through December of the previous year. And then if I want to go ahead and create the budget or just pop populate it forward, I can go ahead and let me just get this from my other screen as well so you don't see me just typing in fields. Right? I can pop this in here and go ahead, copy paste. I can use formulas for any specific line item to grow it by a certain percent, whatever I want. But I can go ahead, copy those numbers in, hit publish, and now I've got an initial budget inside of Qube.
And pro tip here, if you are doing more of a centralized plan, right, you can actually create filters on this and maybe I'll go view, you know, these specific accounts by departments, so on and so forth. This can be like a centralized planning template for you, if you're not distributing it out to your teammates. So really quick and easy. You can go ahead and watch the recording to follow my steps because I know it go kinda fast, but lots of different options to get that initial budget set up in queue.
And I'll just come back here. What we're gonna say is k. We got that initial budget set up.
I wanna go ahead and save that first scenario off. Right? I called it budget originally.
But what I wanna do is give that draft or that first pass a name. Right? I'd call it budget v zero, base budget, initial budget. Go into your cube scenario section, make a copy of it, and save it off as base budget or whatever it might be. Doing that will be a really important step because it's gonna give you a chance to track changes by your team. You'll actually be able to see, hey.
Lee Van, who's on the call helping out in the chat, has not even started his plan yet. I can tell that because his current budget matches the base budget I had put together. It also no. I just said that.
But it's gonna allow you to track progress. Right? So I can see data flowing in real time. I don't have to manually aggregate data together anymore because I have Qube.
And then, ultimately, somebody is going to ask you, hey. What changed from your initial Outlook? You can easily pull that up because you've saved off that base budget inside of queue as a new scenario. You've locked it down, so on and so forth.
Right? So to go show that real quick, that's right back here in my scenario section. You can see what I did as I saved that off. So I created my initial budget, and then all I did is I hit edit on the right here, hit duplicate or copy, and then I called it, you know, base budget.
Hit save. Qube made a copy of it for me. Now I have that for safekeeping, and then all I did was lock it down. And we'll talk more about locking down those scenarios later.
But I just clicked on edit, and right here in the middle is my write protection. So I set it to block, which is basically telling Qube nobody can update this. Right? I wanna freeze this in place so I can reference it, so I can use it to track changes and make sure my team's actually executing their workflows, so on and so forth.
So really vital step. Don't forget it. It's easy to overlook it, but it's so easy to do it, Keith. Just hit duplicate, save it off, and you're good.
Now you have that reference point to help you with your process.
Awesome.
So we've created our initial budget. We've saved off a copy.
Now we need to go create our planning templates.
And there's some things to think about as you're going ahead and creating the templates for your team.
Number one, are you running a centralized or distributed process? Right? Are you hoping to send the head of marketing a template so they can fill it out, make their own inputs, or you manage it more essentially as a finance team where maybe you jump on a call with the head of marketing, but they are not actually touching the spreadsheet, the view. Right? You're kinda managing, making updates via your discussions.
What path you choose there will dictate maybe how you set up your templates.
Second, how far out are you planning? Obviously, we're talking about budgeting today. So for most folks, if you're just on a calendar year, right, that's gonna be through the end of the next fiscal year for a traditional budget. But maybe you're doing a longer term plan.
Right? This doesn't have to be specific to budget. If you're doing a rolling twelve, eighteen, twenty four, thirty six months, maybe you're doing a long range plan three, five, ten years out. Right?
Knowing how far out you're gonna plan will dictate, obviously, the design of your template.
Next, how much history you wanna include for reference. Right? The great part of cube or one of the great parts, I should say, is we have all this historical data inside the system that you can use and activate in your templates to give your team more context.
Right? Usually, my best practice is, like, if I'm trying to budget for twenty twenty five, I wanna show a detailed twelve months for the current year. Right? My actual forecast for the remainder if I have it.
Once you get past current year, kinda up to you. I would not advocate providing five years of detailed monthly columns. Right? Sixty extra columns.
Right? Sometimes you can just provide maybe a quarterly total or an annual total for, like, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two. Totally up to you on that front. You'll see as I go and create this in a second how easy it is to, like, make those adjustments and changes.
So think about, hey. We got all this history in the system. What do my users want to help inform their plans?
And finally, I'm gonna show you creating a report or template from scratch, but a lot of you probably already have templates you might be using.
One of the reasons you probably chose Qube is you didn't have to ditch those. So that's where you can use that select button on the Qube sidebar to go ahead and highlight your existing templates and hook cube up to those. Now you're probably going to make sure the naming conventions and things like that match, like, our date, time frames, and things like that. But don't feel like you have to build everything from scratch. If you have templates that the team is used to that you like, you can go ahead and use those. Otherwise, if you also want just a starting point template, we do have a library of templates.
Some of them match the ones you'll see me playing with today, but you can go access our library for a starting point template as well. So kind of three options. You can build it from scratch. That's what I'm gonna show you because it is super easy.
You can keep using the ones you use today. Just click cube onto those to help you automate that data collection or use one of our starting templates. Totally up to you. Again, we'll be sharing a lot of these resources after the fact.
So let's go build a template.
And what we're gonna do, just to give you context before we jump in, is we're gonna build build a distributed template. So it's the one I'm gonna send out to my department heads.
I'm just planning for the next budget year, so twenty twenty five in this case. I wanna include twenty twenty four by month and then a yearly total for twenty twenty three and twenty twenty two that I can reference against. And, obviously, I'm creating it from scratch, so I'm not gonna, you know, use an existing template in this one. But, again, super easy to kinda go ahead and start working with this, and I'm gonna go into this new input template tab.
So what I have, same concepts if you have you know, our report builders out there where you can use this sidebar to frame this up. So I'm gonna go ahead and click new, and I'm just gonna untoggle my zero rows. Super cool feature when you're doing reporting. I'll just deactivate it for now. But I wanna go build a template for my departments to enter their operating expense line items.
So to do that, I'm gonna pull my accounts into the rows, and I'm just gonna go select my operating expenses.
Next, I mentioned to you the time periods I want. Right? So I wanna plan by month for twenty twenty five. I want monthly detail for twenty twenty four.
And then for twenty twenty three and twenty twenty two, I just wanna show annual totals for my team to reference. So I can untoggle this option here, select twenty twenty two, select twenty twenty three. And, actually, if I go in here, I don't need the quarterly subtotal, so I'm gonna turn those off for twenty twenty twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five. That way, I'm just showing the monthly details as I fire this up.
And lastly, I'm gonna pull my scenarios in, and I'm just gonna start with the actuals. I know I want budget and forecast, but you'll see why I did that in a second. Right? So really easy so far.
Just drag, drop, made the couple selections I want. I'm gonna add everything in as a filter. We can talk about this probably in our advanced session around template design and best practices and things like that. But now I'm gonna go hit fetch data.
Right? So as quick as that, I've built out the framework of this report or template, I should say.
Kiva has dropped in my structure.
So all the accounts, I want all my team to go input. I've got, you know, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty, annual subtotals.
Right? So maybe I'll just do this to make it look nice.
Coming out, this is this model I have only has actuals through July. You all should be, you know, up through August or September. But I do have forecast data inside of queue for these periods, and I believe my scenario is called reforecast.
So I I can easily just change that here. And then finally, out to the right, when I set up this template, I want these twenty twenty five columns to go ping my budget scenario.
So I can now go ahead and hit fetch, and what I should see is Qube will be bringing in my reforecasted values for the end of twenty twenty four by month, by account, and they will also be pulling in that initial budget that I created for twenty twenty five.
Right? So as quick as that, I've got the structure, the framework of this template.
I'm pulling in data from essentially three different datasets. I've got my actuals for twenty twenty two. And best practice, try to, like, highlight and differentiate these a little bit. So I'm gonna go add in some blank spaces here to kinda space this out. I've got my current year, actuals, and reforecast.
Same thing. I'll throw a empty column in here just to space it out. And finally, I've got my twenty twenty five budget, and it's already showing that initial budget that I had for my team.
Awesome. Right? So I can't imagine how much time it takes some of you if you don't have a platform like Qube to go together put together a template like this that's showing me two years, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three total year columns, my current year forecast and actuals for twenty twenty four, and then my budget for twenty twenty five.
Now I'm gonna go spruce this up a little bit. I'll insert some blank rows and things like that to space it out.
Recommendation, try to make it easy for your team to go and consume this and interact with this. Right? Point out, highlight things, space it. That's the beauty of the spreadsheet.
I'm assuming that's why a lot of you chose cube is how easy it is to lay things out exactly the way you want to. And finally, I have some formatting. I've already built out on another screen, so I'm just gonna come steal some of that. Right?
So I'll, you know, try to make this look nice.
Right. So I'm gonna go put some formatting on those two years. We'll pull on this as well and just I kinda cheated and put together some of this formatting in advance so you don't have to just watch me change colors and formats and and bolding and, the bordering and all that kind of good stuff. But I do wanna highlight one key thing as I wrap up kind of building up this template, and that's gonna be when I get to my budget year here.
So So we're gonna go ahead and add some formatting here is you'll notice let me just hit fetch so the data refreshes in here. I have highlighted or changed the colors of the cells based on where I want people to interact. You can use the power of the spreadsheet to go ahead and help point people in the right direction. Right?
So I've seen a lot of templates where, hey. If it's white, that's where you're gonna input. Some use yellow or blue or whatever it might be. Again, that's what's cool with Qube is you can go ahead and choose whatever formatting layout design you want to go ahead and, you know, drive your users' attention to the right sense.
Right? So pretty cool here. I've got two years of actuals. What I'm actually gonna do is throw a little grouping on here.
And now I've got my current year. If somebody wants to open that up and see the monthly details, they can.
And lastly, if I was gonna send this out, what I would probably do is wipe this clean. And now if I'm the head of marketing, I log in to this template.
I would probably the security would dictate everything here to make sure it's kind of filtered down to the right, you know, intersections. But now I'm the head of marketing. I just turn on my template, and Qube's gonna populate those numbers for me. So I can go ahead and start updating this plan.
Again, this is the power here. Really easy to set up these templates. I did this in five minutes showing it off to you. Right? Actually, let me steal the one performing thing here. Right?
We send this out. You don't have to populate the numbers. You don't have to wrangle the data anymore. You just kinda tell Qube, hey.
This is what I want my team to have available, and then they can go ahead and start doing that planning. Right? So this is where it gets cool. You know, maybe I'm gonna go actually, throw a freeze pane on here.
Another pro tip. Make it easier for your team. Freeze panes, just like we're all used to in Excel or G Sheets, wherever you might be. But I'm gonna go ahead and, you know, just key in ten thousand here in my telecom expense, whatever.
That's a new expense we have. But now you don't have to collect that data anymore. Cube is gonna summarize it, and I'll refresh this. I should see the impact on those columns.
But you can view the impact of that immediately in a summary type view, which I'll show you in a second. Right? So I just put this together really quickly, but that's the power of Qube. That's how easy it is to go ahead and generate these templates.
But, again, if you like the ones you use today, use that select feature on the Qube sidebar or use one of our starter templates. If you like our formatting layout, you can go ahead and run with that as well.
So lots more to consider. Like, if I go to the one I I work with customers on, here it is. I've added in things like FTE and headcount for analysis purposes.
Maybe you wanna provide a line that shows the revenue because some of your departments might drive some expenses off of revenue, and you wanna have that in here as well. They might not be able to update the revenue, but you can add in other operational metrics, things like that. And if you look at this template, you can see that ten thousand I keyed in on the other spreadsheet. So really cool.
Keep those things in mind. Right? Is this more centralized? Is it more distributed?
You know, how far out am I planning? How much history do I wanna include in my template?
Use the spreadsheet capabilities to highlight specific areas to make it easier for your users to come in and start to interact with those those templates in web.
Cool. Really cool there.
Come back here.
Next step is you ultimately wanna see how things are going. Right? You're kinda taking a lot of the manual work off your plate. Right? We're no longer creating temp or, like, having to manually wrangle the data, put it in the templates to get the the process jump started.
But now I send this out to or Alyssa. They fill it out.
Current state with without Qube, I have to manually aggregate and collect that. You don't have to do that anymore. Right? With Qube, you can have summary views to allow yourself to monitor the process compared to previous scenarios, and it's really easy to spin those up. I'm not gonna spin it up, just because you'll get the idea based on, you know, your normal report building and things like that. But if I come in here, right, I've got my budget. I've got that base budget I've saved off and frozen.
And I just made an update as the head of marketing in that other template. Right? So if you're monitoring things, you're like, hey. I wanna see how things are going.
Right? Now you with Qube, you don't have to manually aggregate that data anymore. You can just refresh this. There There's no formulas or anything like that linking my tabs together.
Cube's aggregating this in real time. So the second I hit publish, right, Cube's collecting that, rolling it up, and I can see, okay, Jim in marketing's updated his marketing plan by sixty k compared to that base budget we created.
Maybe you're curious where I booked that change. Right? This is just telling me it happened in marketing. Same thing.
You don't have to go dig up my template. You can just go to, like, another variance fee you built out. This one, I built out by depart or by account instead of department. But it could be any slice that you want.
Right? So I can fetch this in here, and I'll be able to see, okay. Jim updated the telecom expense line item by sixty k. Right?
So you got that insight. You're able to see that aggregated result just by having a summary view, and you don't have to touch my template again to bring that value in.
So really important, set up these summary views to make it your life easier. Give yourself those better insights into how things are going, how we're tracking our progress, so on and so forth.
Because you're gonna you know? And maybe it's like, hey. We did we're now doing our second pass of the budget. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna save off my first pass, and maybe I switch that out with base budget. Or maybe I include all three so I can see kinda how the budget has transformed over time.
Right? Here's my base. Here's my b one, my b two, my b three, and you can track the progress of the plan over time. And maybe you have, like, big kinda tentpole events like, hey. Finance review, board review, whatever it might be. You can save those scenarios off with those names.
And I see we've got lots of good questions coming in. Team will answer those, and we'll have time at the end where we can answer those as well. So the summary views, right, allows us to track those changes in real time. We can flag noteworthy changes.
We use conditional formatting to highlight updates, and you can drive that what if analysis. So maybe you as a finance team are doing something like, hey. What if x y z happens? Right?
Using those scenario summary views, you can easily compare. Like, hey. If we acquire this new entity or do this project, it's gonna mean x y z to our point. Right?
So take advantage of the spreadsheet as well. If I come back here right. I typed in sixty thousand, but I'll just go back to this this template. Maybe I wanna go just throw on something crazy.
Right. We're gonna have this huge utilities expense for ten million. Right. I'm gonna go publish that in.
Right? Keeps grabbing that data. I can instantly see the impact and, you know, should be ten million higher. Right?
So I've thrown some conditional formatting on there. That's just normal Excel conditional formatting. Right? Right?
You're not gonna have to sit through a forty hour training, go learn how to add a conditional format. You can say, hey. If it's above five percent or ten percent, flag it so it catches my attention right away. So, again, take advantage of your spreadsheet skills.
Again, the whole reason Qube was created and our mantra is embracing your current skill sets, embracing your current templates. You know, utilize those to give yourself those quick insights and those flags to, hey. I should go look at this.
Alright.
Cool. So we created our budget.
We created our templates. We saved off some scenarios. How are we gonna get these things out to the team?
Right? Probably what you're dealing with today and, like, you dread it is this whole process. Right? I have to spend a week prepping all these templates, then I email them out.
And, you know, Abby misses her email and doesn't see it, whatever it might be. You don't have to keep with that process. You can. A lot of our customers still just enjoy email because it's really easy to track and make sure everything went out.
I do wanna highlight we do have our cube library. I'll show what that looks like. So if you want to send your team a link, like, hey. Go here.
Download the template.
That way, you have more of a workflow path. A lot of our customers like to use that cube library. But because this cube sidebar works so well, you can, you know, save things off in a shared drive as well and just say, hey. Go to the shared drive.
Open up your template. Hit fetch. Your numbers will show up. You can start to plan.
Hit publish, and you're done. Again, it takes all that manual effort off your plate of getting the data and wrangling it together. Again, I still like email. I like that transparency.
I like the audit ability of I send you this template at this time. But the key is you're not having to have them send it back to you per se if they do have a license and can hit publish themselves.
And finally, I've seen customers use count use calendar invites as, like, reminders. You just put a link to, like, the file itself out on somebody's calendar. That way, you can have constant, like, hey. Update your budget.
Budget's due this day. Here's the you're halfway through the budget. Here's a link to it. Go update that.
So feel free to use those. Again, at the core, we're using GSheets or Excel files, so take advantage of the functionality available there, in terms of how that works. But if you haven't seen the cube library, where I'm gonna go is back in our web portal, and we have this output section. That's where you can see the audit trail.
That's where I can go track. This is another handy piece. I'll just highlight this here. So where I can go track those changes.
So here's that most recent change I made. Right? So I went from zero to ten million on the utilities expense for June for the marketing department. Right?
And so you can see who it was. I work for cubes, so it says cube staff. But you can see at twelve thirty two central time on September twenty fifth, Jim updated this. Here's the path.
It would show my g sheet if I was working there, whatever it might be. So quick quick plug for the audit trail. Comes in handy sometimes when you're working with a a pesky budgeter.
But if you want to have easy access or a storage point in the cube web portal, you can store things here in this library.
You can see here I've got, like, my budget template in GSheets. I have a link to it, or here's my budget template in in Excel. I could go ahead and download that. Maybe I have, even a link to, like, Excel online. Cube does work. That's our sidebar does work in Excel online if you wanna access it there as well. So feel free to use this along with any of the other techniques I just highlighted to get your templates out to your your team members.
Cool. So we got our budget.
We created that first pass. We saved it off. We created our templates.
We got our templates out to the team. They're inputting. They're publishing, so on and so forth. We're getting that instant feedback. How do we manage these scenarios? So a couple quick pro tips here.
Use those scenarios to manage and track your your process.
And you're gonna have probably big stages like first pass, second pass, third pass. Some organizations do that. At a minimum, I would advocate, hey. Just save off a copy at the end of every week.
It it's almost no time. You just say, hey. I wanna take my working budget, save off a copy so I can go reference that if I need be. Or somebody's like, I can't remember.
I, you know, I made that update. You know, you could hunt through the audit log, but you could just tell them, okay. Go look at, the version from September twenty fifth, and you should have that bold change you had in there if you wanna, you know, bring that back in.
So keep that active kinda working budget, but you can save that off so you have those budget v one, budget v twos, and it allows for tracking and visibility. Like, I'd like to set up that that report where you show all these passes next to each other and can show what's changing, you know, version to version, pass to pass. Again, that's just one of the most powerful aspects of any FP and A platform is having that scenario capability to make sure you have that visibility.
And, again, the last like, a question that comes up all the time for finance teams is, well, what changed? Right? This allows you to answer that question very quickly. I can just pull up my p and l at v one against v two, and I can tell you right away, oh, you know, this section of my expenses went up ten percent.
Right? And then I know that came from marketing and gym. Maybe I drill into that to get some more details. But saving off those scenarios is gonna give you tons of extra insights, be able to answer a lot more questions more quickly because you can just say, hey.
This changed, and you don't have to go dig manually to find that out.
Right? Makes it easy to answer what's changed. And then lock down those scenarios as well. We showed that before.
I'll show it again in a second to make sure that nobody updates those accidentally or or changes those accident up from under your feet. Right? So it's really cool to be able to go do that. So you can use security also to hide scenarios.
So I've worked with organizations that, hey. We have a company plan, and everybody internal sees these numbers. Right? And then we have a board plan.
And maybe only three or four people actually see the board plan. I don't want my head of sales per se to see that. It depends on how you set things up. But it's that, hey.
I'm gonna shave ten percent off of our company plan, and that's gonna be maybe the the plan I communicate with the board so I can keep my team incentivized and motivated to hit that, you know, bigger plan. But I maybe I have a more, you know, conservative version of that that I'm sharing with external stakeholders. So I'll show you those two things. Again, just a refresher on the locking down.
I showed this before.
But as you're going through, if I was gonna go make a copy, September twenty fifth copy, I'll go ahead, take my working budget, which is just called budget, duplicate it. So hit copy, save it off with whatever name. And then once I have that saved off, you would go here, and I'll just go to b three and hit edit. And then under write protection, this is where it locks it down and restricts people from being able to update that specific scenario.
Right? So everybody can still see it. They can reference it. They can build reports off of that, but it should be locked down so folks can't update that.
Cool. Now if you wanted to do that, use security to, like, not even display, like, the board plan to certain team members, that's where you could come to our team section. And, you know, if I was gonna go add in Lee Van right. Let me go here.
Right. I can add in Lee Van, select his role, but then I can scroll down to my scenarios here. Where is that gonna be? Probably down here.
Right. So I can say, like, hey. He doesn't get to see, you know, mine. Wouldn't turn off my final budget.
I don't have, like, a board plan budget, but I could restrict it so that team member couldn't see that board plan budget, if they didn't want that too. K. Awesome. So just to recap, use cube, create that initial budget.
We showed some techniques. You can go review that as well.
Let me pull back up the slides here.
Go ahead and save off, like, initial base budget or initial budget, budget v zero for your reference.
Gave you some tips on how to spin up those templates, but lots of options there. Again, we can use your existing templates. You can use some of our starter templates or create them from scratch. Like I just showed you, it's really easy to do.
But some of that might be dictated on what type of plan you're doing, who's engaging. Is it centralized, decentralized, so on and so forth?
Save off your scenarios as you go through so you have that traceability.
Distribute them a lot of different ways. Right? The cube library is a good option, but you can still keep doing it via email or share drive or calendar invites, things like that. And, again, track your progress, use security where it makes sense.
So that being said, I think we're going to open it up for questions, and we will give a shout out. We do have a bunch of extra things coming up like our office hours for this content. If people have more questions that don't get answered today or or wanna dive into some specific examples, we'll open it up there. But, otherwise, hopefully, we got some good questions from the the chat and the q and a.
I'll, let Alyssa hit me with the questions that we got.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Jim. This has been great. Liban has been doing a great job answering questions as they come in.
Feel free to add some more questions down there, if anything's popping into your head. But for now, Jim, I'm gonna throw a couple of the questions that Lee Bin answered your way just so that everyone has the benefit of hearing the answer.
Mhmm.
So the first one I have, will formatting stay the same if you refresh the data?
Yes. It should. So if I come back and show one of my templates here, right, I I refresh this. All this formatting I have applied, it does not get overwritten.
So that's a a nice aspect of Qube. Other solutions I used in the past, it would wipe away your formatting. Right? I can go ahead and delete all these numbers out too, and that would be give me an absolute heart attack if I didn't have Qube.
No big deal. I can just hit batch. It should keep all that formatting, the layout, everything like that. You'll notice it's not gonna wipe away this color schemes I added.
So the only thing we put on by default is that if it's an inputable cell, it'll show up with blue font. If you can't, it'll show up with black. If you don't like that, you can untoggle that, up here in the settings, I believe. Where is it?
Settings. We have some options you can explore there. But I I personally like that blue setting because it gives me, like, a visual cue, like, oh, I'm not at the right spot because I can't see the the numbers full.
Great.
Next one we have here. In this budget layout with the actuals for the last twelve months and the budget for twenty twenty five monthly, the departmental users will not see the formulas in parenthesis assumptions for how the budget numbers were arrived at. How do you address that?
So a couple things there. Right? Because I'm fetching it in, you can because you're in a spreadsheet, you could go ahead and, you know, work with this template. Like, you know, I'm I'll adjust my formatting here to make it look a little bit nicer because it's gonna bump me if I don't.
But feel free to put that in, like, assumed or I have, like, some twenty five percent growth. That's an aggressive growth, but, you you get the idea. You can put whatever assumptions in that you want. Also, you can have sections that are not connected to cube in the middle.
Like, if I wanted to put, like, some formulas or calculations in the middle here that are still just using spreadsheets, like, formulas, whatever it might be, I can throw that in the middle. As long as it's not in a cell that cube is talking to, I can go ahead and make those adjustments. So it's really up to you in terms of how you set things up, how you take advantage of the real estate on the screen. But, yeah, that is we do get that question.
Like, sometimes it's as simple as, like, a gross margin formula. It's like, I know Qube can calculate gross margin for me, but I know my team's gonna wanna click in the cell and see the formula. Well, then just don't have Qube populate that value. You can still keep using formulas as you might see fit.
So up to you in terms of how you set that up. And we'll get this to this in more advanced sessions as well. But you can disable fetching on a range. So you could set this up as, like, two ranges as well.
So one's my fetch range of the historicals.
And then my budget year, we disable the refreshing, and you can just publish. That way, you can continue to keep any formulas you want. So if I use, like, a trailing three month average formula here to go ahead and populate this value, If I'm worried about people, like, refreshing over that, I can disable that if I want. So we'll talk more about those kinds of concepts in our advanced session, but lots of different options we've set up to kind of facilitate that.
Perfect.
A couple more just came in. So can I add a new vendor slash supplier slash customer in the budget?
Yes. So couple of concepts to consider here is what you're doing with vendors and or just itemized planning in general.
So we're gonna get this in one of our more detailed sessions, but this is obviously a a straightforward template. It's just accounts, departments, so on and so forth.
Maybe I have areas that are more detailed. Right? So my software spend, I like to itemize it out. My travel is the example here. I like to itemize my travel spend.
You can set up a template to capture deeper levels of detail. So if I come here to my t and e tab, you'll notice this six zero five travel expenses.
I have that just baked into the template, and I've included my other dimensions just to avoid, like, user error. But you'll notice I have, like, six extra columns I could add in a second or a seventh if I want to on the fly here, like, first class.
Right? Yes.
But what I've told Qube on this template is all pointed to that one account, but it's allowing me to itemize it is there's a set attributes buttons right above the publish button.
And what you can do is you highlight those columns, and I've already done this. But then you hit mark for attributes, and it's saying, hey. Everything that shows up between g and m, capture those notes. So now I'm itemizing my plan, and I could go in and add as many, like, new line items as I want, a new vendor, whatever it might be. I'll just go in and, like, change this number to show it flow through. Right? But this is not my, like, detailed travel plan.
But the key is it's all oops. Wrong way. It's all pointed at that six zero five account. So it sends it there.
So if I come back here and refresh this, I should see, like, five k every month, except I should see a jump. Whatever. There it is. August.
Right? I put in, like, that huge conference for three hundred k. What's cool is you can use the drill down button. So the same way you can drill into actuals.
If you're not aware of this, on your reports, you can click in a cell and click drill down. And if it's sourced from, like, your GL system, you can drill down and, you know, pull up transactional details. But I can pull up budget details as well. So you might just be a finance team member overseeing this at a high level, and you're like, what is Jim doing in August?
Like, what is this huge expense?
You don't have to go dig through my template, go find it, worry if it's the right one. You just click on that cell and just click drill down, and it pulls back that itemized detail.
And all the notes I have right side of this big conference in Texas for three hundred grand, it'd be like, what what's going on there, Jim? We talked about this before. It was thirty grand, not three hundred. Right?
Is that extra zero? Do you actually wanna spend that much? Whatever it might be. So in terms of adding new vendors and detailed line items or just any area of your plan in general, you can go deeper where it makes sense.
And I would say you can keep that in this template and just have line items if you want. But if you do have extra notes and contacts and things like that, it makes sense to break it out into its own tab.
Now if you're looking to do detailed BVAs by vendor, like, I need to know how much I actually spent with this vendor, that's where you would add vendor in as a dimension behind the scenes in queue.
And it can get hairy there. We have customers that have thousands of vendors.
In reality, you're probably only truly planning and analyzing maybe the top couple hundred. Right? So that's where you'd wanna talk with your CSM, your implementation manager around, like, what's that true, like, subset of my vendors that I actually want to do this for? Because if I had a one off service with Jim Bullis for thirty dollars or whatever it is.
Right? I came in and, you know, painted your ball, whatever it might be. You probably don't wanna plan by that. Right?
But if it's your spend with Amazon or your utilities or or your maintenance service, right, you probably wanna plan that out because it's gonna be a bigger spend. So bringing in vendor as that extra dimension can be powerful if you're looking to do BBAs. If you're just looking to do itemized planning, you don't have to go through the extra overhead. You can just set up some, you know, more detailed input templates to be able to plan at that.
Great.
It looks like we have one more new question here.
We use Teams channels with private subchannels for budget owners to store our budget templates. However, as far as I know, the library in Qube lacks access restrictions, allowing users to access others' folders and view their budgets. Are there any future updates planned to add folder permissions within the Qube library?
I believe there are.
I can't speak to it because I'm not on product team, but I have seen that. So we can get back to you if you wanna ping your CSM, on that specific question. But I believe there is plans to add folder structure, within that library.
Awesome.
Well, unless anybody has any last minute questions, I think we've made our way through the q and a portion.
So with that, I will share my screen so that I can share some resources with everybody.
Alright.
Can you see my screen?
Yes.
Perfect. Okay. So first resource, registering for the remainder of this series. If you liked what you saw here today and you wanna learn more about forecasting and advance planning, you can sign up for those sessions. Forecasting is on October ninth, and advance planning is on October twenty third. You can just click that link to register if you haven't already. Next are the office hours I mentioned earlier, in this session.
So those are gonna take place tomorrow, September twenty six at two PM eastern time. This time is reserved specifically for you to ask questions all about Qube. So anything you didn't get to ask today, feel free to ask them there.
Next is our guide to planning in Qube. Our very own Abby Bowen, worked on this, and it's chock full of great information for you. So highly recommend you checking that out if you wanna dive more into planning.
Next is our newsletter, the finance fix. This is written by our CEO, Christina Ross, who is also a former three time CFO. She has lots of great info and contacts in the finance space, and she shares that with us, at least once a month, sometimes more often in this newsletter. So highly recommend subscribing to that to stay in the know.
Next is our strategic finance pros Slack community. This community is made specifically for strategic finance pros like yourself, who are, you know, just itching to give advice, answer questions, ask their own questions, share thoughts, feelings about the world of finance. We also share some exclusive content in there, let you know when webinars are coming up, job opportunities, networking opportunities, all sorts of stuff like that. So highly recommend checking that out. And lastly is our help center. If you have any questions at all, that you wanna just see if it exists in our help center, odds are it probably does. There's lots of good information in there about how to use Qube and how to navigate the platform.
So feel free to click that link for any additional info. And with that, I believe we have come to the end.
So thank you everyone so much for joining today. Be sure to keep an eye out on your inbox for all of the links and resources that I mentioned earlier. And with that, hopefully, we'll see you on the second for the forecasting session.
Otherwise, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much, Jim.
Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Happy budgeting.
Bye.
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