Budgets & forecast

The budget module shows plan, actuals, committed and contract-bound costs per cost center × category in one matrix — always for a fiscal year.

Key terms

Term	Meaning
Plan	The planned annual amount of a budget cell
Actual	Sum of booked costs (bookings)
Committed	Ordered but not yet invoiced amounts (purchase orders)
Bound	Actual + committed
Contract-bound	The share fixed via assigned contracts

Fiscal years & categories

Fiscal years and budget categories (e.g. Software & licenses, Cloud services, Hardware, Maintenance & support) are managed by an administrator under Administration → Settings. Exactly one fiscal year is active; all pages default to it.

Planning a budget

1. Open Budgets and select the fiscal year.
2. Enter the planned amount per cost center and category.
3. Optionally add a note and an owner — the owner is responsible for the budget, decides on budget requests and is notified when warning thresholds are reached.
4. The matrix immediately shows utilization and remaining budget.

Utilization indicators & warning thresholds

Every cell carries an indicator: green (on plan), yellow (warning threshold reached), red (exceeded). The budget warning threshold (configurable under Administration → Settings) additionally triggers notifications to the budget owners — in-app and by email.

Deleting a budget

You delete a single budget cell via Budgets → Edit cell — at the bottom of the card Delete budget (administrators/controllers only, and only while the fiscal year is open). If the cell already has bookings or purchase orders, the dialog shows their number; you must explicitly approve their co-deletion via a checkbox before the delete button can be confirmed. Deletion is irreversible and removes the cell's bookings and purchase orders along with it.

Year-end forecast

Contrixt calculates a run-rate projection per budget cell: the actual costs so far are extrapolated to year end. The forecast never drops below the already bound costs (actual + committed + contract-bound) — a deliberately conservative lower bound. You see months in advance where the year will land.

Budget rollover

At year end you carry the plan values into the next fiscal year with one click: pick the source year, optionally set a percentage adjustment (±%), then Roll over. Existing values in the target year are not overwritten.

Next year planning

For a structured, cross-departmental budget planning process, open Budgets → Next year planning. Unlike the simple rollover click, this workflow lets you collect planned values from multiple cost center owners before they become binding.

An administrator first creates a planning round for a target fiscal year — optionally pre-filled with the planned values of a base fiscal year (default: the current year). Budget owners then enter planned values bottom-up per cost center × category, but only for their assigned cost centers; administrators and controllers see and edit all rows. For comparison, the previous year's plan and the previous year's actuals so far are shown.

Every round moves through three statuses:

Status	Meaning
OPEN	Round is in progress
REVIEW	Submitted for review (by the creator or a budget owner)
APPROVED	Approved (administrator only)

From REVIEW, an administrator can send the round back to OPEN for revision at any time.

Approval is the decisive action: it writes all planned values of the round as budgets into the target fiscal year. After that, the round can no longer be changed or deleted. As long as a round is not approved, an administrator can delete it at any time.

Alternative: quick rollover

If you don't need multi-step coordination, the simple budget rollover with a flat adjustment (see above) is often enough.

Year-over-year comparison

The Reports module compares the current year with the previous one — per cost center, category or in total. Details under Dashboards, reports & exports.

Budget not sufficient?

Budget increases run through budget requests — with an approval workflow instead of email ping-pong.