In this article:
The LivePlan Dashboard offers a great way to monitor and review the health of your business over time because you're comparing two critical timelines:
- Your forecast: How you budget for your income and spending in the future
- Your actuals: Your company's actual performance in the past and present
This article covers using the Dashboard as your starting point in LivePlan. If you have already built a business plan forecast in the app, please see Setting up the Dashboard after you've created a forecast.
Connecting to your accounting solution
Note: if you aren't using Quickbooks Online or Xero, you can directly enter your actuals. This option will populate the Dashboard with your actuals but won't build an automated forecast. You can still create your forecast manually in the Forecast section.
Viewing your actuals in the Dashboard
After the sync with your accounting solution (or direct entry of your actuals), the Dashboard section of LivePlan will be populated with your accounting actuals. You'll be on the Overview page initially and be able to see how the actuals for this month, quarter, or year compare to the previous period:
For more information on the LivePlan Dashboard metrics and how to use it, please see these articles:
- Using the Dashboard Overview
- Dashboard Trends: comparing your actuals to your forecast
- Metrics available on the LivePlan Dashboard
- Printing reports from the Dashboard
Viewing and updating your starting forecast
When you've synced LivePlan with QuickBooks or Xero, your starting forecast data will be generated using one of two methods.
If you have at least 13 months of actuals, LivePlan will automatically calculate a rate of change based on the overlapping months between the current year and the prior year, and then apply that rate of change to the subsequent years of your starting forecast.
If you have less than 13 months of actuals, LivePlan will still generate a starting forecast. But it will use the most recent available values and copy them year-over-year as your starting forecast.
Whichever method LivePlan uses, further edits to the forecast must be done manually. The starting forecast is meant to be just that - a starting point that you'll review and update to mirror your strategic vision.
For more details, please see Adjusting the automatic initial forecast.
Where to go from here
Depending on how you're using LivePlan, at this point you might want to complete other sections of the software. Here are some things you can do from here: