Revenue

Planning: budgets and forecast scenarios

Split a month into what you earned and what is still to come, then grade it against a budget version or a locked forecast scenario.

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Who this is for: Manager, Owner, Read-only — reading requires rms.analytics.read; the actions below on an existing version require rms.plan.manage, which the default Manager bundle carries and Read-only does not. Where: Revenue → Planning

Planning is where a month stops being a number and becomes a number against a target. It holds three things side by side: where the month actually stands, the budget you committed to, and a forecast scenario you pinned down at a point in time.

The measures are the ones defined on Analytics. What is new here is the split, and the two kinds of version you grade against.

Important

Creating a budget or a forecast scenario is not on this screen right now. The inline "New budget" and "New scenario" forms were removed from Planning so each could become its own dedicated feature — tracked separately and not yet built. Until then, this screen reads and grades against versions that already exist; it has no way to create the first one. If Budget versions or Forecast scenarios shows an empty state, that is expected on a fresh property, not a bug.

Read the month position#

  1. Set Month to the month you are reviewing.
  2. Read the three cards across the top.
Card What it holds
Actual Nights already stayed — everything before the as-of date
On the books The as-of date onward — booked, not yet delivered
Month total Both together, with the month's occupancy and RevPAR

The split at the as-of date is the point of the screen. A month that is 60% through is two different conversations — one about what you earned and cannot change, one about what you can still sell — and a single month-to-date figure hides both.

Below the cards, vs Budget and vs Forecast grade the month total against each version, showing the target and the variance in nights, money and percent. A month no version covers says so rather than showing a zero.

Activate a budget#

  1. Find the version in Budget versions.
  2. Select Activate.

Activating makes that version the one the month position and the variance report are graded against. One version per year is active, so activating a version archives whatever was active for that year. The archived version is kept, not deleted — last quarter's plan stays readable beside the one that replaced it.

Important

A draft budget is invisible to every other screen. If vs Budget says no active budget covers the month, the usual cause is a version that was written and never activated.

Lock a scenario#

  1. Find the scenario in Forecast scenarios.
  2. Select Lock.

Locking freezes it. A locked scenario is the one you can defend in a meeting three months later, because nothing has moved underneath it since.

Promote a scenario into a budget#

This is the mid-year refinement flow: the year's original budget has been overtaken by events, and the current forecast is the better plan.

  1. Find the scenario.
  2. Set the target year in the field beside Promote to budget.
  3. Select Promote to budget.

The scenario's numbers become a draft budget for that year. It grades nothing until you activate it — which is the safety in the flow, because promotion is one click and replacing the plan a month is measured against should not be.

Note

There is no screen for the planning taxonomy itself — market segments, rate categories and the buckets a booking window is graded in are configured through the Open Hotel Protocols API. What that taxonomy does to these screens is on grain and variance.

What's next#