Planning: Budget forecast
What number should I put in next year's budget, and how confident can I be?
The forecast is built bottom-up: each segment (campus, and optionally membership) is forecast on its own seasonal history, then the segments are added together. That captures the fact that a young campus and a long-established one grow differently, while still reporting one total.
- Fiscal year
- Totals roll up to your fiscal year, set by the start month in Settings.
- Prediction intervals
- 80%, 90% and 95% bands produced by conformal prediction — the model is scored against periods it never saw, and the size of its past misses sets the band width.
- In-sample accuracy
- How the model performed on held-back history. Use it to decide how much to trust the line before you budget against it.
- Unattributed giving
- Gifts with no donor record attached. Shown as its own category because it cannot be forecast from donor behaviour — treat it as planning uncertainty.
- 1Choose the fiscal year and the grain you budget in (usually month or quarter).
- 2Read the central forecast as the expectation, not the plan.
- 3Take the lower edge of the 80% band as a conservative budget number, and the gap up to the central line as your discretionary or contingency layer.
- 4Check the unattributed share. If it is large, widen your contingency rather than trusting the band alone.
Example
Next fiscal year forecasts at $2.40M with an 80% band of $2.18M–$2.63M. Budget committed costs to $2.18M, plan the next $220K as approve-if-it-arrives, and note that $95K of last year's giving was unattributed.
Where to click: Planning → Budget forecast