Add driver tabs

Only the budget owner and administrators can add tabs to a budget workbook but other users can contribute to those tabs via the workflow.

When you create a budget workbook, it has one worksheet tab, the Main tab. You can add other tabs to the workbook to bring in more detail to the budget to either simply have this information at hand, in one central location or use it to drive budget values. There are different types of tabs you can add and you can add as many tabs as you want.

Drivers, sometimes referred to as assumptions, are used in most budgets. They are key business factors that influence financial performance, such as operational costs. These factors often change during the budgeting process, so it can be useful to manage them in additional tabs. Drivers act like powerful working lines. You do all the data entry budgeting in the driver tab and the data flows into the Main tab, sometimes automatically, as illustrated in the image below. When you make changes in the driver tab, the data in the Main tab updates accordingly. The use of driver tabs saves you a lot of time when it comes to updating budget data.

You can add the following driver tabs to budget and forecast workbooks:

  • Manual Entry - A blank worksheet in which you can manually enter data. It doesn’t automatically drive budget values but you can reference its data in formulas in other tabs to drive values.

  • Lookup - Similar to a Manual Entry tab (you need to enter data) but with a prebuilt dimension structure and entities inherited from another tab, and default data values you can edit. It doesn’t automatically drive budget values but you can reference its data in formulas in other tabs to drive values.

  • Reference - A worksheet containing data from another Phocas database. Doesn’t automatically drive budget values but you can reference its data in formulas in other tabs to drive values.

You can add the following driver tabs to budget workbooks only:

  • Database - A worksheet containing data from another Phocas database. Its structure is based on that of the Main tab, so it automatically drives items in the Main tab. You can also reference its data in formulas in other tabs to drive values.

  • Headcount - A blank worksheet in which you can import or manually enter employee salary, bonus and commission data, along with associated benefits, such as pensions and gym memberships. it automatically drives selected items in the Main tab. You can also reference its data in formulas in other tabs to drive values.