The Planning Grid brings all your production tracker information together with all expenses and non-production income

As conditions change, it’s important to keep a close eye on your business, so Figured gives you an adjustable forecast to work with which we call the Planning Grid.

All livestock and production income information (actuals and forecasts) is entered and edited via each of your production trackers and automatically pulls through into your planning grid. To find out more about updating information in your production trackers, check out the appropriate section in the help centre.

NOTE: These production figures will be uneditable in your planning grid because they originate from your production trackers.

All other income and expenses will be entered in your planning grid. When editing, ensure your global settings allow you to enter a forecast in the months you wish. This is commonly used through selecting Actuals + Forecast and Actuals to Last Month.

In the example below we have our global date selector to show a combination of Actuals and Forecast data in our Figured season.

To take a look at a full years forecast, set actuals to the last month of the previous season year, or actuals to none.

There’s a variety of ways to enter values into your plan, depending on whether the amounts are fixed, or regularly change e.g. they fluctuate.

Fluctuate – If you’re budgeting for random or fluctuating amounts, then enter these manually into each cell.

Fixed – If you’re looking to copy or spread a fixed amount across the year, then you'd use the function as per below.

Click into a cell, enter a value at the bottom, and copy or spread it across the year.

You can also proportionally spread according to your last years locked annual plan using a distribution curve like below.

You can choose to allocate expenses and/or income as a percentage across your trackers by clicking on ‘+ Add Allocation’. You must always set the Start Date (the end date is optional, Allocations will continue to be added if no end date is included). Select the Tracker and percentage you would like the transactions split across, and add in more options by selecting ‘+ Add Allocation’ as many times as needed. If there is a portion of the transaction you would like to remain unallocated please use the ‘No tracking’ option.

The distribution symbol will appear for any account line that has forecast allocations set up. You can see the summary of each month’s split by hovering over each month at the bottom of the screen.

In the event that you have assigned multiple allocations to an account, it will show under each Tracker it has been allocated to within the Planning Grid. When you click on the transaction a pop-up will appear at the bottom of the screen. All editing will be done in this pop-up, rather than the Planning Grid itself.

If you need to remove an allocation for any reason you can do so by clicking on the saved allocation. From there you have the option to remove an individual line by selecting the bin icon or the entire allocation by selecting ‘Revert and Delete’.

The planning grid supports entering calculations into each cell - we allow subtraction, addition, multiplication, division, and brackets.

All you'll need to do is click into your cell and enter your formula!

This allows for planning expenses and/or income as percentages of a particular account, as a dollar per hectare, dollar per milk production metric or stock unit allowing you to plan more efficiently and accurately. More on that in this help article.

If you want to reset any account for the year, click on the green arrow and set a fixed amount back to $0 per month.

For your plans and forecasts you need to enter your $ values against these accounts as either positives or negatives, depending on the account type and if you're wanting to reflect an increase or decrease in bank account balance.

This article breaks it down for the account types.

For video tutorials on the planning grid check out your YouTube playlist here.