Budgeting and Forecasting

Every department budget in Unity moves through the same seven-state workflow — Draft, Submitted, UnderReview, Approved, Published, with Rejected and Superseded as the states that keep history honest — driven by explicit actions (submit, approve, reject, retract, publish), never a status a manager can quietly edit. Each budget line pairs an account code with twelve monthly allocations and can optionally restrict itself to a single fund, so a restricted-fund overage is caught the moment the line is drafted, not months later. Self-approval is blocked outright: a department manager holding budget-approval rights can't sign off on the budget they just submitted — it takes a separate reviewer, or a tenant admin, to move it forward.

Once published, every department budget rolls up automatically into one org-wide plan aggregated by account code, with a rolling year-to-date view and a budget-vs-actual variance report computed straight from posted journal entries — nothing but a Published budget ever counts toward the number the board sees. Need to change course mid-year? An amendment opens a new, versioned draft with a required reason while the original stays untouched for audit. On the forecasting side, a linear-regression model projects revenue and expenses forward on a rolling 12-month basis from two years of posted activity, and AI turns the period's largest variances into board-ready commentary — or flags an unusual spending pattern by alert before it becomes a bigger problem.