Budget Setup
The Budget area in Avero let's you enter the useful information that will translate into your P&L reporting. Additionally, by adding a budget, you will be able to view your budget to actual comparison in the Avero Mobile app!
Before you begin, please note that in order to update budget information, you must be a Finance admin. If you are not a finance admin and believe you should be, please reach out to your organization's designated Avero Admin.
In this article, the following topics will be discussed:
- Setting up your Budget
- Completing a Bulk Upload
- Covid Budgets: Set 2019 Actuals as a 'Budget' to replace YOY Reporting during COVID recovery
Setting up your Budget
To set up your budget, follow these steps:
1. Go to Settings and navigate to Finance.
2. Make sure you are on the Budget tab and click Add
3. Your budget can be as detailed as you would like. Select your Budget Level, Metrics, and Details. Then, click Next.
4. Enter Budget Name.
5. Choose to either manually enter budget information or use Avero’s “Replace data with…” tool. Using the “Replace data with…” tool allows you to choose a year or previous budget and populate a specified percentage that is greater than or lower than the selected data
6. The DOW Breakdown shows you the weight at which gross sales totals are distributed across each day of the week for viewing MTD and WTD analytics in Avero. You may edit these to redistribute the weighting as long as the sum of the percentages is equal to 100%
7. Click Save.
Completing a Bulk Upload
You can also chose to complete a bulk upload when setting up your budget. To do this, complete the following steps:
1. Under "Create New Budget", click Download Template
2. Enter in your budget information without formatting the cells. If you change the format of the cells, the upload process will fail and you will need to re-download the template and start from scratch.
3. Save the document without changing the file name.
4. Click the Upload button on the main budget screen and search for the file you modified or drag and drop the file into the identified box.
Covid Budgets: Set 2019 Actuals as a 'Budget' to replace YOY Reporting during COVID recovery
We know that many restaurants are struggling to find relevant reporting during Covid. Most restaurants were plagued by closures and capacity limitations in 2020 and as such, find it an inconvenient comparison for sales now that recovery is underway. Since 'Year over 2 Years Ago' is not an available comparison and custom comparisons cannot be automated, if you have access to Avero's Finance solution, this can be a way around to valuable comparison.
First, you will setup a 'Budget' that will actually be your 2019 actual performance. Then you will be able to run and automate a P&L report that will compare your current performance to 2019 actuals. Note that because of the way data rolls up, this report will not be useful for daily comparisons, but weekly, monthly, and MTD comparisons will be available. For a good daily comparison to 2019, see our recommended Logbook Field Addition in Covid Reporting FAQs.
Set up 2019 Actuals Budget
The steps are the same as setting up any budget:
1. Go to Settings and navigate to Finance.
2. Make sure you are on the Budget tab and click Add
3. Your budget can be as detailed as you would like. Select your Budget Level, Metrics, and Details. Then, click Next. We recommend using Weeks (or Calendar Month) to get the most detail for your future reports.
4. Enter Budget Name such as 2019 Actual or Covid Baseline.
5. Use Avero’s “Replace data with…” tool. Using the “Replace data with…” tool allows you to choose a year or previous budget and populate a specified percentage that is greater than or lower than the selected data. For this purpose we want to import the actuals as-is.
This will take a moment to load. If you have a large operation it may take quite awhile. If you notice the operation completes but some weeks are missing, try again and it will load the missing weeks. There is a lot of data to import for a full year!
6. Click Save.
Success!
Running the Comparison Report - YO2019
Now to run & automate a Year-over-2019 report, select P&L (or Group P&L if you have multiple businesses) under the Finance tab.
Select the report metrics, using your Covid Baseline/ 2019 Actual budget as the reference:
You will have a comparison of current performance to 2019 actual performance! Use the envelope icon to schedule this report to run regularly.
