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Build a budget without preparing a workbook. A connected AI client reads historical results, proposes a starting value for each account, and saves the monthly values only after you review and approve them.
The recording has narration, and the figures, entities, and account names in it are illustrative. Nothing in the video is a target or a benchmark.

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What happens in the recording

  1. The user asks a connected AI client to create a next-year profit and loss budget with three rules: check historical data account by account, decide per account whether December run rate or a three-month average is the better guess, and clean one-offs from the data.
  2. The client reads statement actuals through MCP and analyzes each account’s history against those rules.
  3. It creates the budget in Control and resolves the group accounts it will write to.
  4. It writes the monthly values through the Control MCP write tool — a full year, seeded from actuals.
  5. It reports its work back: the method chosen for each account, the one-offs it excluded and why, and the seasonal patterns it deliberately kept rather than flattening — with every decision open for review.

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Try it in your workspace

  1. Connect an AI client with MCP and confirm the session has write access.
  2. Tell the client the baseline rules you want: which months form the baseline, which methods are acceptable, and how it should treat one-offs. The recording uses “December run rate or three-month average, whichever fits the account” — yours can be growth assumptions, headcount plans, or anything else it can apply account by account.
  3. Ask for the analysis first: the proposed method per account, the items it would exclude as one-offs, and the patterns it would keep as seasonal — without writing anything.
  4. Review the proposal, correct it, and then confirm the write.
  5. Open the budget in Control to verify the values, then refine allocations cell by cell or ask follow-up questions such as “How does this plan compare with this year’s actuals?”

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One-offs and seasonality are judgment calls

Review which expenses are genuinely one-off and which recur or follow a seasonal pattern. A repair charge may be non-recurring, while holiday pay may follow a predictable schedule, but neither classification should be assumed. Use your historical records and planned commitments to decide what to include. Make the client show its reasoning for both lists before anything is written. Every excluded item should name the account, the month, the amount, and why it is unusual, so you can veto exclusions that are actually recurring. Where the history is too lumpy to call — sparse professional-services spend, an account that changed meaning mid-year — the client should say so and ask, not pick silently.
Example prompts: “Before writing anything, list every one-off you plan to exclude, with account, month, amount, and reasoning.” “Which accounts did you treat as seasonal, and what pattern did you keep?” “Salaries are moving to a headcount plan in Q3 — seed them from the run rate but flag them as needing manual revision.”
A seeded budget is ordinary budget data: any reviewer can inspect, edit, and lock it in Control, and the seed is a starting point rather than a finished plan.

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Decide the account mode before seeding

A budget’s account mode is set when it is created and cannot be changed afterward, and it decides what a plan row can be keyed by. A group-account budget holds one value per group account and cannot be split by entity later. Choose the mode from what the plan’s rows actually identify: local-account mode when a row is one entity’s own ledger account, entity mode when a row is an entity total with no account breakdown, and group-account mode only when no entity split is needed at all. Do not infer local-account mode from the mere presence of entity or cost-center detail — a cost-center split is a dimension on a row, not the row’s key. Ask the client which mode it is creating and why before it writes anything; correcting the choice later means rebuilding the plan.

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Troubleshooting

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A seasonal account came out flat

A flat monthly baseline may hide a seasonal pattern. Compare it with the account’s monthly history and ask the client to explain the proposed distribution. Review payroll timing, annual renewals, and seasonal revenue before changing the monthly values, and check that the annual total still matches your plan.

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An excluded one-off was actually recurring

Re-add it explicitly: give the client the account and the months, state that the item recurs, and ask it to restate the affected months. The reverse also happens — a genuine one-off kept in the baseline inflates every month built on it. This is why the exclusion list is worth reviewing line by line before the write.

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The written values do not match the stated method

Ask the client to reconcile a sample of accounts: recompute the stated method from the actual results it read and compare with the saved values. Check the baseline period, excluded transactions, monthly distribution, and rounding. Open the budget alongside actual results in Control to verify the same accounts before approving further changes.

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The budget landed on the wrong accounts

The seed writes to group accounts, so the client must resolve them from your chart rather than guess from labels. Ask for the account identifier behind each written row, and reject matches made on similar names alone.

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Next steps

Import a budget

The companion workflow when the plan already exists in a workbook.

Budget versus actual

Compare the seeded plan with actuals on a reconciled basis.

Plan and review a budget

Refine allocations, review, and lock the budget in Control.

Connect a client

Connect Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or another MCP client.