About
Spreadsheet Link is Syft’s extremely useful tool that enables you to upload a multitude of data from different spreadsheets into Syft such as trial balances, budgets, forecasts or connections data.
In this article, we will talk specifically about budgets and forecasts. Performing a budget in a spreadsheet provides a large degree of flexibility in what adjustments you can make to your forecast.
📓 Note
Remember that uploading data to Syft via Spreadsheet Link remains free and therefore, these templates are available to all users on all plans.
We know there are many types of adjustments you may want to make to a budget to cater for different scenarios, but may not know how to. Examples include planning for the purchase of a new asset or accounting for contract revenue correctly. To assist you in making those adjustments, we have developed a swath of templates you can use to cater for different transactions!
Types of templates
These templates can be used to run a specific scenario and then the output can be pasted into your budget or forecast for upload into Syft. Here are the templates we have:
Contract Revenue/Deferred Revenue: Useful to time revenue recognition separately from the receipt of cash
Property, Plant and Equipment: Use this template to plan for anticipated equipment purchased or disposals and the commensurate depreciation impact
Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable: This template can be used to schedule payments into buckets as well as plan for anticipated bad debts in your receivable balances
Loan Amortisation: We built this template to help with any standard debt you may have or plan to take on. This template will assist in calculating interest, payments and loan balances which can then be uploaded into your budget or forecast.
Leases: Make the correct adjustments to your accounts for any leases that you acquire that need to be recognised at finance leases (GAAP) or in terms of IFRS 16.
How to use a template
The first thing to know is that these templates are only available in Excel for now, with support for Google Sheets coming soon.
To access the templates, open up Spreadsheet Link in Excel.
Choose “My Account” to activate the sidebar then login.
Once logged in, click on “Upload to Syft.”
Next up, select either “Budgets” or “Forecasts” as applicable.
At the bottom of this page, you will see a selector titled “Select Utility Template”. Here you can choose any template from the dropdown menu.
Once you choose a template, it will populate as tabs at the bottom of the sheet. There will be an “Instructions” tab and a “Template” tab. Follow the instructions on the “Instructions” tab to populate the template in question.
Checklist
In all of the templates, you will be required to:
Create a budget or forecast in Syft
Create new accounts in the budget or forecast. These accounts will house the adjustments
Import the budget or forecast in Excel using Spreadsheet Link
Calculate the adjustments using the template
Copy and paste the calculated values from the “Template” tab into the budget or forecast
Upload the new budget or forecast into Syft
Once you’ve done all of the above, you will have a forecast that takes into account all of the adjustments as you may need them! You can now trust that your budget or forecast is accurate and begin using it to run your business and set targets.