Notes for September 9, 2017

General

Budgets have been enhanced and released for your 2018 budget season! We're extremely proud of this update as we took a few months to speak with many of you, combed through every item in feedback, and reviewed every support ticket from the past few years to determine what you liked, disliked, and hoped could be changed about budgets. Check out the new budgeting experience today* and let us know how we've done! 

• Tired of managing budget templates? So were we. The #1 time waster with budgets revolved around those dang templates! We created a budgeting solution that unifies your enterprise and improves accuracy in reporting by getting rid of the template concept and building budgets in a way the entire organization can be a part of. This means you will never again have to call Matrix because you only create a template once per year and who wants to remember something like that each year? It'll simply be there waiting for you at the start of each new year!
• We know that you want an easier way to find total amounts to quick budgeting questions so the Budgets landing page will now act like a mini report that helps you to answer quick questions about This Year and Next Year budgets.
• The first thing most managers told us that they do with budgets is increase them by some percentage of last year. We love to hear that! What we heard, however, is that you really want to increase the budget by the Forecast more than anything else! This way you can take advantage of pending that has not yet booked as well as booked dollars throughout the year and get a more complete picture. Great idea, guys!  
• Budgets can now be locked by month. If a manager in Pittsburgh locks the budget, he/she will only lock it for their sales team and not impact another manager that may be in Atlanta. If the corporate VP decides to lock the budget, then he/she will lock the budget for all salespeople in the organization. At this time, only salespeople are locked out and managers are free to continuously make changes.
• Managers often told us that they carry accounts just like a salesperson and wanted an easier budgeting experience too. We created a simple way for the manager to tweak budgets for the team as well as their own accounts that they are personally responsible for. 
• Both salespeople and managers will be able to focus their budgeting experience by Account, Outlet, or Revenue Type and then quickly jump to any other Account, Outlet, or Revenue Type...or completely switch focus to another view.
• Exporting budgets for offline editing was a hugely popular feature in Matrix. We sat down with users of this feature in order to find out why, and as we suspected it was because of the easily readable flattened view. Budgets are no longer built in a hierarchy and can be entered in a flattened view just like you did in Excel.

We have a LOT more enhancements to come with budgets this year, and we plan to release updates as they are built/tested instead of waiting for any type of big release. We know this time of year is frustrating and you'd rather be selling so we've prioritized the remaining enhancements around ways that will help you be more efficient in your budget entry. 

Stay tuned for more exciting updates as we release them, and welcome to the 2018 Budget Season!

*Every enterprise was given the option to use the previous edition of budgets or move forward with the new budgeting experience. If your budgets look the same as last year, these notes will not apply to you and you will be upgraded for the 2019 budget season.