Ask Runway AI Copilot
All Categories
Planning & collaborating
Budget vs. actuals (BvA)

Budget vs. actuals (BvA)

Compare how you’re actually doing (actuals) with how you thought you’d do (budget).

In Runway, you can lock different versions of your budget as reference points, and compare them to actuals as new data comes in.

This guide walks you through:

  • Preparing your budget (by locking scenarios).
  • Creating a BvA comparison using tables and charts.

Step 1: Lock your budget

Your budget lives in scenarios—separate versions of your model representing different forecasts (downside, base, upside).

Before tracking BvA, you need to lock your budget scenarios so they don’t change. To do this:

  1. Disable auto-updates from main to freeze the scenario:
      • In the scenarios list, click the Settings icon next to your scenario’s name.
      • Disable Pull updates from Main.
      • This prevents changes from main scenario and integration syncs from affecting your budget.
  1. Prevent user edits for added security (optional):
      • Set Editing to Disabled in Scenario Settings.
      • This blocks accidental changes from your team.
      • If changes are needed later, you can temporarily enable Editing, make adjustments, then disable editing again.
Notion image

Step 2: Set up your actuals

Your planned budget now lives in a locked scenario, while actuals come from live data in your main scenario.

To ensure that actuals reflect finalized numbers:

  1. Open main scenario.
  1. Set Last close date to the end of the time period you’re analyzing.
      • For example: To compare budget vs. actuals for January–March, set Last close to March.
      • This tells Runway to pull actual values for closed months, while calculating future values using forecast formulas.
Notion image

Step 3: Compare Budget vs. Actuals

You can analyze variances between budget and actuals using tables or charts.

Option 1: Create a BvA table

  1. Open a model or create a Driver table in any page.
  1. Add the drivers you want to include in your BvA.
  1. Click Customize (top right) → Select Compare → Choose budget scenarios.
  1. The default view shows time-series values for each scenario. You can add Variance and Variance % to track the difference between budget and actuals.
  1. You can also adjust the table layout to show scenarios as rows or columns.
Notion image

Customizing variance colors

  • By default, if actuals exceed budget, Variance and Variance % appear green. If actuals fall short, they’ll appear red.
  • To reverse this—like when lower numbers are preferred for cost metrics—just set a goal for the driver to be below zero.
Notion image

Option 2: Create a BvA chart

  1. Create a Driver chart in any page.
  1. Add the relevant drivers.
  1. Click the Compare icon (top right) → Select budget scenarios to compare.
  1. Choose a line or column chart to visualize trends.
Notion image
 
Did this answer your question?
😞
😐
🤩

Last updated on May 15, 2024

[Beta] Scenario settings Investor reporting