Financial forecasting

You can use the planning scenario feature of BMC Financial Planning and Budgeting module to generate financial forecast for your organizational unit(s). A financial forecast is a way to estimate future financial outcomes for an organizational unit. You can estimate future costs using a combination of historical costs (actual cost data) and budgeted costs for the time to come.

Use case for financial forecasting

In this use case Calbro Services user personas help to illustrate the user scenario. The typical steps described by these use cases are in keeping with BMC best practices.

The use cases do not refer to specific Calbro Services sample data. To follow the use cases, in some instances, you might need to create your own sample data (for example, projects, assets, planning scenarios). In addition, you might need to grant additional permissions to certain users.

Allen Allbrook is a manager responsible for department-level financial planning and budgeting for an organizational unit at Calbro Services. Allen has created planning scenarios for the organizational units for fiscal year 2012. The planning scenarios consists of projects, assets and IT staff as required for each organizational unit. Allen has also loaded budget data associated with projects, assets and IT staff in to the planning scenarios. After 6 months, Allen compares the actual budget data for past budgeted values. Given the actual budget data for last 6 months, Allen wants to forecast the financial outlook till the end of the year. The financial forecast would include actual budgets for last 6 months and budgeted data for next 6 months.
 Allen can use the financial forecast capability of BMC Financial Planning and Budgeting to accomplish this goal.
To generate financial forecast, Allen completes the following steps:

1. Allan loads the budget data in the current planning scenario.
2. Next, he creates a copy of the planning scenario.
    When he copies the planning scenario, he can specify the date till which the actual budgets are available. This triggers the application to use actual budgets for first 6 months and budgeted data after that for the copy of the planning scenario.
    The new planning scenario now reflects total budgets for the year including actual and budgeted data. Allen can use this planning scenario to forecast the financial outlook for the entire fiscal year.