Activity Categories: new dimensions of budgeting

Activity Categories: new dimensions of budgeting

At Beyond, we breathe life into your budgets. This means giving you the context behind every actual or forecast – which activity does it belong to? Who’s responsible for it? Which budget does it come out of? Which financial month/year does it fall into?

Being able to answer these questions in real-time already places you many steps ahead of most businesses, but we can do even better.

How about being able to answer these questions?

  • What’s my monthly spend on travel and how does it compare to other categories?
  • How do my revenue and costs compare across locations?
  • How much per year is going towards business-as-usual versus strategic work?
  • What is the budget variance for my key programmes across the business?

These questions, and many more, can now be answered with the powerful new view added to the Budget Explorer:

A full picture of the finances, any way you choose…

And this view is just the start – from here you can click into any category and drill down to the underlying activities, actuals and forecasts that drive it. Very cool.

These views are made possible by the use of ‘Activity Categories’. They’re extremely flexible – think of any category or dimension you’d like to tag activities with (like Location, Programme, Type, Client, Goal…) and list the different values this category can take. Then whenever any user creates an activity, they’ll be able to choose which category value to tag that activity with.

Creating a new activity category – easy as 1, 2, 3

In only a few clicks, you can ensure every relevant activity is tagged by the categories that make sense to you. Tracking budgets and managing activities across the business just got a whole lot easier.

Happy tagging!

Of course, the Budget Explorer view and the underlying Activity Categories are both completely customisable, so you can slice, dice, breakdown and summarise based on your precise business needs (and update them as they change).

With Beyond, you’re always in control.