We are currently in the midst of the 2020 budget process and I was wondering what problems and/or difficulties other TBM Offices are having during this process?

One of the biggest issues we've run into is the duplication of line items on the "other" tab when transitioning from Forecast to Budget. The bottom line originally caused us to look further into the tabs and found that some line items were being double counted. Unfortunately we had to manually go through and remove the duplicates since we did not have an easier way to go about this process. It would be nice to remove multiple line items at once in Apptio but I don't believe that's possible at this time.

We also use Apptio "IT" planning for our Human Resources department and seem to be having good feedback with the process and clarity into how much is actually spent in different areas.

Please feel free to comment how your budget season is going! Thanks all!

While you can't remove multiple lines in Apptio you can export the data to excel delete the lines and then import it back into Apptio.

That's exactly what we did. However, it was a time consuming endeavor to go through many different types of lines to make sure we did not miss any. @James Caldwell

I agree you can export and re-import. We have a lot of lines in Apptio to go through and also have to delete multiple lines sometimes. What I have found is that it takes longer if you have columns grouped. It may be doing some sort of calculation that holds it up. I also tend to use the filters and hide columns that aren't needed. The less data you have on the screen, the quicker the deletion process. I would like to see an option of deleting multiple rows at a time. I wonder if that isn't already a suggested improvement that we can vote on. Since they have added "duplicate row" as an option(which is very helpful), I have accidentally duplicated instead of deleted rows a few times. They are right next to each other.

Hi @David Lyon, I wish this didn't sound so familiar!  My team went through the exact same thing during our budget process earlier this year.  This is actually a known issue, when baselining a Budget off of a Forecast: Troubleshoot: Duplicate expenses when creating budget - Unfortunately, their workaround is not as helpful, if you are already deep into the budget process.  As a result, we went through the manual delete process as well... so I totally understand your frustration. 

I posted an idea for deleting multiple rows here:  Delete Multiple Rows 

Thanks, Samir!  Actually this is the Option #2 we had back then. Just create a new plan without a baseline and import everything In!  
(Good to know we have this "real" document that says this can be done!) 

Thank you! 

Best, 

Rose 

Hello, 

Morning everyone! I have the same exact scenario on that when we transition Forecast to Budget. We did the same, export and delete those line items that we know are just duplicates or values were -0-. However, I would agree that this is time consuming and there should be a better way of doing the process. 

Most of our duplicates are from the Salary GL Accounts. I reached out to our Apptio contact and he mentioned about the Labor Summarization and Actuals Summarization in your Company Profile. It is recommended that these 2 should be summarized the same manner to align the line items. I am yet to do the testing as we are currently busy with 2020 Budget. But will keep you posted for any updates!

This might help you - Best practices: Forecasting 

[IT Planning] Summarize financial actuals down to the following dimensions and/or attributes 

And finally, I guess this is the reason why they created a Summarization / Grouping in Company Profile: 

What's New in July 27, 2016 Release  

Thanks, 

Rose 

Your issue on the other tab was a big one for us. We cleaned it up manually.

The other issue is the inability to create a budget from a forecast plan. The amounts don’t balance. If you don’t do forecasts, this isn’t a problem.

One thing that may help with deleting the Actuals that got brought over into the budget is to use the new Default Value feature in the Line Item tables.  @Phillip Probst posted a blog about how to do this:

Planning for Success: How to identify where planned line items are being generated 

This is great info @Rob DeLeo! Thank you for adding a link to that blog post by @Phillip Probst