Dynamics 365 Business Central: Budgets And Forecasts Part 2

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Budgets and Forecasts Part 2

Okay, so now we are populating budgets. We have to use the dimensions. I touched on the dimension in previous video. If you need to know more about dimensions, there are a bunch of videos on the channel about dimensions, so I encourage you to get into that if you don't know what the concept is. It's used a lot in these budgets.

What I want to tune in right now is as we're entering in the budgets and getting ready to use it to compare to actuals, I want to get into how to get this from Excel. Basically, you have the sales budget. You've got some lines in here that you're populating. These lines, they are broken up by dimensions. You could have the item group. You could have region. You could have customer group, so all kinds of groups.

When you filter on these lines to type in elements, this could be very complicated. I could say I'm in the item group, coffee; I'm in the region, northeast; and I'm in the customer group, small. I'm typing in what I want for that for the month of February. It gets really into detail, and a big headache to actually get it into the system.

What do we use when we have a headache like that? We use Excel because we're Microsoft. We drop this into Excel. There, we have the lines out. We can have it filtered. Even better than using Excel, or on top of using Excel, we also delegate it out to someone else to do. You can separate out the regions or the customer groups between salespeople that actually work with that area. They get an Excel sheet. They populate the stuff in the Excel sheet. You get that back. You import it into the budget, and you're good. Let's see how to do that.

Okay, so we're back in the budgets. We were just typing in sales budgets for the iNECTA coffee mug. I'm going to keep going on that. If I got into sales budgets, here, and go into what I was just working on. Now, I filled in for all of the different customer groups, which is small, medium, large for northeast. The totals are this.

Now, populating it like this is really difficult, obviously. You might want to give the sheet to someone else to work on. What if we actually just say, okay, I'm going to get customer – small customer group and the region, northeast, right here. I want to do this in Excel. If I go into actions, export to Excel, just create a new document, the system will actually bring in an Excel document. It should pop up here any minute. There it is.

I should be able to type in the numbers for what I want. If I got back into here – so I have here, let's say for the medium drip coffee, and the paper coffee cup, and the coffee beans, I'm going to create data. I go in here, and that's – it would be nice to get, actually, the description in here. No, we don't have that. Anyways, that's fine. Let's say we have here 250, oops. I've got to enable editing, 250. Let's say this is just going to be straight on 250 all the way. This one is going to be 300, 350, 400. It's going to follow the same path as the other ones, 350, 300, etcetera, then 300 going out.

Now what I want to do is bring this back into the system, so basically save it. If I go back into the system here, and I can just hit import. Replace entries, that's fine. Now I just want to bring in my book, yes, okay. Now, I have, hopefully, the data in here. Let's just go out and back in. Let's see. Maybe I did not save. Let's save it. It's book two. Just close it out and hit actions, import, yes, okay. Choose the file. There we go. Now they're in.

You can basically export it to Excel, type in your numbers there, and notice that this is all on the small. I had affixed it on the small dimension. Now, if I click on medium, it's going to blank out the entries that I have. You have to, basically, do it for every single segment and upload it up.