Designing a new budgeting platform to replace spreadsheet budgeting

The annual budget lived in a family of spreadsheets passed between finance and department leaders. Each cycle meant rebuilding templates, re-keying history, chasing versions, and reconciling submissions back to the chart of accounts by hand.

When budget preparation consumes the cycle, there is little time left to challenge assumptions. Version drift also made it hard to know which number was final — a control problem as much as an efficiency one.

• Mapped the full budget cycle: who submits what, which assumptions drive each line, where the approvals happen, and where reconciliation broke down.
• Anchored every budget line to general ledger accounts and departments, so a submission can always be traced back to the ledger.
• Separated driver assumptions (attendance, pricing, labor) from the resulting financials so they can be reviewed on their own.
• Built iteratively with AI-assisted development, validating each module against the prior-year budget before department leaders used it.

• A web-based planning platform where departments submit operating and capital budgets inside guided forms.
• Historical actuals flow in from the accounting system, replacing manual copy-forward.
• An attendance and revenue workbook that sets the driver assumptions the rest of the budget depends on.
• Role-based access, so each leader sees their own departments and finance sees the whole.
• AI-assisted analysis for comparing submissions against history and flagging lines that need a conversation.

• One place to find the current version of the budget, instead of a folder of files.
• Budget lines that reconcile to the chart of accounts by design rather than after the fact.
• Finance time moved from assembling submissions toward reviewing assumptions with department leaders.

• Driver-based planning
• GL-anchored budget structure
• Web application
• ERP data integration
• Role-based access
• AI-assisted development