Yes, the figures you entered might be correct — but are your outputs really reliable? When you’re working with budgets, the model behind your numbers matters.
🧮 Hidden Risks in Your Budget Model
Are you confident your budget outputs are correct?
🔹Are your working‑capital movements correct in both timing and value?
🔹Are you confident that the formulas you used (in spreadsheets or other tools) haven’t introduced errors?
🔹Remember: spreadsheets are notoriously error‑prone — the wrong formula, the wrong link, the unbalanced statement.
Are you absolutely sure?
✅ How Forecast 5 Makes It Better
Whilst Forecast 5 comes with a wide variety of very useful relationship factors that calculate on your input raw data, simplifying your budgeting, (e.g. costs as % of Sales, % of Wages, as % of KPI’s, of Costs – plus many more) the question above relates to how you confirm that your budgeting model is correct and in balance all round?
When you prepare your budgets with Forecast 5, you know it is a very robust self-balancing modelling system with a double entry type architecture and it is easy to confirm this – and reassure yourself.
The key to checking the integrity of Forecast 5’s outputs is the fourth of our key reports, the Funds Flow Statement. This forecast report, opens with the forecast operating profit and closes with Net Cash. It is simple to tie this figure up with the Closing Net Cash per Forecast 5’s Cashflow statement as well as the movement between the opening and closing balance for the bank account on the forecast Balance Sheet.
After confirming that the movement on the Retained Earnings on the Balance Sheet agrees with the opening figure on the Funds Flow statement and that the Balance Sheet does indeed balance (which often may not be the case if budgeting with Excel), you can sleep well at night, knowing the Forecast 5’s balances all round. And that your model’s integrity is beyond doubt.
🔍 Final Thought
You can never escape GIGO. But with Forecast 5, once your input data is sound, your forecasting model becomes robust, transparent and verifiable — giving you confidence in your budget outputs.
