Budgets & scenarios
Does the growth plan stack up once you include the people and costs?
Turn business plans into consistent, comparable financial options.
An illustrative workflow, shaped around your systems, records and approvals.
A typical manual workflow
Your team prepares,
checks and produces.
Gather the plans
Collect sales expectations, hiring plans and proposed spending.
Bring the numbers together
Combine inputs and check the same costs have not been missed or counted twice.
Rework the alternatives
Update the plan for different prices, hiring dates or sales volumes.
Agree the plan
Challenge assumptions and decide which spending to commit to.
With Octopi systems
Connect the sales plan to what it takes to deliver.
- Brings expected sales, prices, staffing and costs into one plan, whether supplied by an owner or several teams.
- Recalculates the plan when you change hiring dates, prices, sales volumes or supplier costs.
- Flags assumptions that do not fit together, such as more jobs without more delivery capacity, or a new hire with no allowance for equipment.
Choose where to invest and what to change.
You and your managers challenge what is achievable, decide where extra capacity is needed and agree the spending the business can support.
Inside the system
The tools, instructions
and checks behind it.
01Capture structured assumptionsRules + data
Capture expected volumes, prices, staffing and spending with dates and an owner for each assumption.
Planning forms · Assumption register · Validation rules
- Input
- Department plans, owners and supporting assumptions.
- Output
- A versioned planning dataset with missing-input flags.
- Checks and human role
- Require owners for assumptions and preserve submission history.
02Calculate the financial optionsModel + calculations
Calculate the effects of changing prices, hiring dates, sales volumes and costs across the same model.
Driver-based model · Scenario calculations
- Input
- Approved drivers, baseline actuals and scenario inputs.
- Output
- Comparable budget, cash and funding outputs.
- Checks and human role
- Use defined calculations and reconcile consolidated totals.
03Review consistency and trade-offsAI assistance
Challenge mismatches such as sales growth without delivery capacity, or missing recruitment and equipment costs.
Claude or ChatGPT · Budget challenge instructions · Reusable instructions: Budget challenge review
- Input
- Calculated scenarios and documented assumptions.
- Output
- A challenge list and concise comparison for management.
- Checks and human role
- Keep proposed changes distinct from approved assumptions.
Example instructions
Review the supplied sales volumes, prices, staffing, capacity and spending assumptions against the calculated budget scenarios. Flag growth without delivery capacity, hiring without related equipment or recruitment costs, and changes whose cash needs exceed the supplied funding. Cite the relevant assumption or model output. Ask for missing evidence rather than assuming all costs rise in proportion to sales. Do not change approved assumptions.
04Agree and monitor the planHuman approval + system
Management chooses the plan and spending priorities, then compares actual results with the approved assumptions.
Budget owners · Version control · Performance reporting
- Input
- Reviewed options and resolved assumptions.
- Output
- An approved budget with accountable owners and monitoring.
- Checks and human role
- Lock approved versions and record subsequent changes.
Illustrative workflows after setup. Your existing automation, systems and processes determine the work removed. People provide context, resolve exceptions and retain agreed approvals.
What could change for your business?
Spend less on finance.
Get more from it.
Tell us what is taking too much time, costing too much or leaving you without the information you need. Let's explore what the right systems could change.