Setting Up Budgets in Pulse Dashboard

Adapted from How To Setup Budgets for Macola® in PULSE Dashboard on leahyconsulting.com.

Pulse Dashboard works with two kinds of budgets, and they come from two different places:

Financial budgets (Executive and Financial modules)

Financial budget figures are defined in the Macola® G/L, account by account — on the Budget tab of each Account Card in Macola® ES and Macola 10, or in Budget Maintenance in Progression.

For the Executive module’s headline graphs, identify a G/L account for each of these three measures:

• Booked orders — new orders entered into Macola® for the month
• Shipments — typically what would be invoiced for the month
• Backlog — the typical open orders at any point in the month

Once budget amounts have been entered in Macola® for booked orders, invoiced orders and open orders for each month, register the accounts and the budget scenario/revision in Pulse Dashboard at the top of the screen under Executive menu → Budgets.

Sales budgets (Sales & Marketing module)

Sales budgets are maintained inside Pulse Dashboard, and you can keep several of them. There are three ways to build one:

1. Copy last year’s actual values, then adjust up or down
2. Enter the budget manually
3. Import the budget from Excel — click Create Excel Template first, fill in the generated worksheet, and import it back (the template’s format is required)

An annual budget is entered by month, and can be defined at any of these levels:

• Customer
• Salesperson
• Item
• Customer + Item
• Customer + Item + Alternate address
• Item + Location
• Salesperson + Item

Each month’s figure can be expressed as sales dollars, sales units, average selling price or margin. Mid-year (or for a following year) you can adjust a budget by a dollar amount or a percentage.

Using budgets on reports

On each report in the Sales & Marketing module you may select up to two budget scenarios in that report’s setup — open it with the red wrench icon.