Input, review and approval — on one governed model
Budget owners across the business submit into the model instead of emailing workbooks. Review comments attach to the numbers they concern, approval routes to named owners, and the cycle status is visible without chasing anyone. Every step is logged.
What is an end-to-end budget workflow?
A central hub where Finance and business teams plan, align, manage reviews and move each cycle from input to approval. Distributed input into a governed model, review threads attached to the numbers they concern, approval routing with defined owners and states, and cycle status the Group FC can see without asking. Every submission, edit, comment and approval is recorded in the audit trail.
One cycle, one single source of truth, one recorded path from input to approval.
Budget owners and entity controllers submit into the governed model, in the grid they already know, against the dimensions that matter to them.
Comment threads attach to the specific numbers they concern, so the conversation lives beside the figure rather than in an email chain.
Routing to named approvers with defined states. Nothing moves forward without a recorded sign-off.
The approved budget becomes the baseline every variance report is measured against, automatically.
Why does the spreadsheet cycle break?
Because it was never a process — it was a file. Budget input arrives by email attachment, review happens in comment columns, approval is an inbox search, and the reconciliation burden grows faster than the business does.
Four failure modes, all of them structural rather than occasional.
Version chaos
Parallel contributions from entity controllers and budget owners, overwritten assumptions, and formulas inserted in the wrong row. Prof. Pak-Lok Poon's 2024 review found 94% of business spreadsheets used in decision-making contain errors.
No audit trail
The board asks where a number came from. The auditor asks what changed between v3 and v4. A workbook cannot answer either question, and at a governed group that is a governance event rather than an inconvenience.
No visibility
Nobody can say what stage the cycle is at without asking five people, so the Group FC spends the cycle chasing rather than analysing.
What does governed distributed input actually require?
Access control at the measure and field level. Without it, letting thirty budget owners into one model means letting thirty people see the whole group's numbers — which is why most mid-market planning stays inside Finance and arrives by attachment.
Security by Measure is the enabling capability, not a feature line.
Access control at the measure and field level, across financial, non-financial and calculated measures
Role-based access by company and GL account, so each entity sees only its own slice
Complete audit trail on every submission, edit, comment and approval, with before and after state
One governed model underneath, so there is only ever one version of the cycle
Explore other use cases
Planir is built for the planning and reporting cycles that funded, governed, and multi-entity businesses actually run.
Multi-entity consolidation
Consolidated financials across every entity, every accounting system, and every currency, with intercompany eliminations applied for you.
See multi-entity consolidationInvestor reporting
The financial section of every monthly and quarterly investor update, generated from your live NetSuite data.
See investor reportingBoard reporting
The financial foundation of every board pack, with variance analysis by dimension and forward projections your board can interrogate.
See board reportingBudgeting and planning
Driver-based 3-way budgets and forecasts built from your live data, with every assumption documented and reviewable.
See budgeting and planningPre-transaction preparation
Investor-grade 3-way projections with documented assumptions, ready for fundraising, M&A, and due diligence.
See pre-transaction preparationCommon questions about budget workflow
What is a budget approval workflow?
Who submits, and who approves?
Do contributors outside Finance need to see the whole model?
How is this different from collecting spreadsheets?
Does the approved budget flow into reporting?
Can we use this for forecast cycles as well as the annual budget?
How long does it take to set up?
See the workflow with your own budget cycle
Bring your budget structure and the list of people who contribute to it. Leave with a view of what that cycle looks like when it runs inside one governed model.