Charlie LiuGlobal Chief Customer Happiness Officer | CEO Founder, FCFO & CFO Tech Advisory, MCC Inc. · Founder CEO & CFO Advisory at MCC Inc - FP&A Experts & Top Tier Vena Partner | Driving Financial Excellence | Chief Happiness Officer

Should your BvA model in Excel be fully dynamic

9 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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In this video, the speaker argues against making a Budget‑vs‑Actual (BvA) Excel model fully dynamic. He explains that when the chart of accounts changes—such as a new account being inserted—the dynamic model causes all subsequent asset rows to shift, breaking the alignment between the static budget and the actuals. This misalignment renders the BvA comparison ineffective. As a best‑practice solution, he recommends manually selecting and mapping accounts so the budget structure remains fixed, while actuals are populated through formulas. This approach preserves control over the model’s structure and ensures reliable BvA analysis.

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why are you manually selecting the accounts? The reason why I want to do this is because I want to have control over my structure. If you think about this, if you think about your chart of accounts, oftentimes you might have a new account every so often, right? If you get a new account in the middle of your chart of accounts, and if this is dynamic, what happens is all your assets are going to shift down, but then my budget is static, right? So that is no longer going to match, and now the BVA is not going to be very useful, right? So my best practice, what I do is I'd like to have control in terms of my mappings, have my budget static, and then have my actuals be fed in through the formulas that we have in this model.