Most companies use Excel or similar for managing their forecasts and budgets. The reason for this is that Excel allows users to create and visualize their time series data in a way that is intuitive.

Specifically, records are arranged in columns and attributes are displayed in rows. Usually, the records are ordered by a date field (ex: budget month) in ascending order. In a budget or forecast, the values for a given attribute (for example: heating costs) sometimes follow a seasonal trend. When we are looking at heating costs, we can clearly see the change in value over time as a result of the attribute being a row value.

Companies who use Salesforce don't manage their budgets or forecasts in the Salesforce app, as it does not provide the same type of intuitive view as Excel or the like. Fortunately, AppGrid does provide this type of view and makes it very easy and fast to migrate this critical business data to Salesforce.

The other challenge is related to creating new budgets or forecasts. Image a budget with 200 items. Creating a new budget would involve 200 transactions, and you would have no context to inform your choice of values when creating the record. Very unintuitive and labor intensive.

The AppGrid time series view works like Excel. You have the ability to enter all of the data for a budget or forecast in a single transaction, and you can utilize AppGrid functions like drag/copy to quickly enter values for a given attribute.

Budgets and forecasts are critical and sensitive enterprise data that should not be living in Excel documents. This data belongs in Salesforce with your other enterprise data.