What Easel is

Easel plans one company's next twelve months: revenue, costs, hiring and cash. You build the plan from your real actuals, every amount shows the arithmetic that produced it, and the budget your departments agreed stays exactly as it was approved.

Your posted accounting stays in your accounting system. Easel keeps the assumptions, the alternatives, the approvals and the record of decisions. It is MIT open source and runs on your own computer.

What you can do

• Set up the company, its reporting currency (AUD by default), the fiscal year, departments (one of them can be a shared cost centre), planning lines and people.
• Build the plan from revenue drivers (volume × rate, or customers × revenue per customer with churn and ramped sales hires), positions with your own on-cost assumption, recurring and one-off expenses, shared-cost allocation, and opening cash with collection and payment timing.
• See how every number was calculated. Choose any amount in the profit and loss and Easel shows the driver, the rate and the month behind it.
• Run the budget cycle. Departments revise, comment on and submit their own numbers; finance returns or approves, and approval freezes exactly what was approved and by whom.
• Compare scenarios. Branch a downside, change an assumption, and compare profit and closing cash month by month, with every changed assumption and cell listed.
• Close each month with actuals, keep the prior forecast, explain the variances with the accepted rows behind them, and publish a review pack anyone can download as HTML or CSV.
• Move in your general-ledger CSV and your Excel planning workbook, and export and restore the whole installation.

What Easel does not do

Easel does not post journals, calculate payroll, tax or statutory statements, consolidate entities, convert currencies or evaluate spreadsheet formulas. On-costs and tax assumptions are your inputs, and Easel labels them as yours.

Where to go next

Start with Run Easel, then Set up your plan.