Considerations for Using Balance Sheet Planning

A flag on the Activity page, Includes Balance Sheet Planning, allows you to indicate whether the line item activity uses balance sheet accounting. If the flag is checked, then the system looks up every account in the activity to determine its account type. If the account type specifies that this is a balance forward account, then the system displays and stores a starting balance (also known as period 0) for the account. Likewise if a statistical account is flagged as a balance forward account, then the system displays and stores a starting balance for the statistical account.

Balance sheet planning stores a starting balance, and transactional amounts for each budget period. You can view through analysis reports the summary or aggregate time periods, such as quarters and years, which display the sum of the changes in the underlying periods. For example, if you have ten people in January and you plan on hiring two more in February, then Planning and Budgeting stores two (the transactional amount) for the month of February.

Balance sheet planning uses an additional time period in which is stored the starting balance. There is only one starting balance for a line item account row, even for a multiyear model. In a two-year model, for instance, there is one starting balance which precedes period 1 for the first year, while the starting balance for the second year is the ending balance for the first year.