The budget: the year planned by account, the month measured against it
An amount per account per month. The rooms lines are derived from occupancy and rate, the outlet from covers and check, the rest typed; then every month the ledger is measured against it and a rolling forecast says where the year is heading.
Menu → Budget. A hotel plans its year the way its ledger reads — an amount per account per month — and the revenue lines are not typed but derived from what the hotel actually plans: an occupancy, an average rate, the rooms it will have; covers and an average check for the outlet; events and an average event for the hall.

Do this
- Plans — every plan for the year: its kind (*budget* — the bottom-up plan; *target* — the owner's top-down number; *forecast* — rebuilt on demand; *scratch*), its version and its status (*draft → submitted → approved*).
- A new plan — name the financial year and the kind; start empty, copy another version, or copy last year's actuals times a factor.
- The grid opens a plan.
- Budget vs actual is the report.

The grid
One row per account, one column per month. The drivers (occupancy %, rooms available, ADR, covers, average check, events, average event, per month) sit above it; Derive writes the revenue lines from them and touches *only* lines whose basis is *driver* — a typed line is never overwritten. The rest — payroll, utilities, marketing, rent — is typed. Capital lines have an item name instead of an account and are what the asset register consumes.
Submitting and approving
Submitting is one person's act and approving is another's: the person who submitted cannot approve. One approved budget per hotel per year per kind; approving a later version supersedes the earlier one. A comment on a line — Explain the variance — lives on the approved budget and survives the forecast being rebuilt.
The forecast and the variance
Forecast is rebuilt on demand: a month the hotel has audited to its end is the ledger's actuals; the month in progress is actuals to date plus the approved budget's daily rate for the days left, never below what is on the books; a future month is the approved budget, never below what is on the books. The basis on each line says which. Budget vs actual is per account per month — budget, actual, forecast, variance, per cent, the comment. Cash outlook is the budget's month-by-month revenue, expense and net, which the cash forecast reads when it looks past its own horizon.
Who
*budget.write* (the accountant and the GM type and submit), *budget.approve* (the owner's people). Reading is the financial reports right.