Planning: budgets and forecast scenarios

Who this is for: Manager, Owner, Read-only — reading requires rms.analytics.read; creating a budget or a forecast scenario requires 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.

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.

Record a budget#

A budget is a version with one line per month: room-nights and room revenue.

1. Select New budget.
2. Set the Year, and give it a Label that says which version it is — "Board budget", "Q3 refinement" — because you will have several.
3. Fill in room-nights and revenue for each month you are targeting. Months you leave blank are simply not part of this version.
4. Select Save draft budget.

A new budget is a draft and grades nothing.

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.

Quan trọng

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.

Seed a forecast scenario#

A forecast scenario is the demand model captured as a version — so you can compare against what you believed in March, rather than against what the live model believes today.

1. Select New scenario.
2. Name it for what it is — "Rolling 90-day", "Worst case Q4".
3. Choose the scenario type: rolling, worst case, best case, or custom.
4. Set the date range it covers.
5. Select Seed scenario.

The scenario is created from the live demand model as it stands today, and its as-of date records exactly that.

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.

Ghi chú

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#

• Grain and variance — the same budget compared against the book, at grain
• Forecast and pace — the live model a scenario is seeded from
• Portfolio roll-up — the group view; budgets are per property