Financial Planning
Overview of Financial Planning — tracking budgets against actual spend across FMX.
Financial Planning is a separately licensed FMX product for tracking budgets against what you're actually spending, across your day-to-day operations.
How this differs from Capital Planning
Capital Planning is about long-term, project-based spending — equipment replacement, multi-year capital projects. Financial Planning is about ongoing operational budgets — tracking a category of spend (like "HVAC Maintenance" or "Building A Supplies") against what's actually being spent on it day to day, pulled automatically from your other FMX activity.
The two products can be licensed independently, and they share some underlying accounting infrastructure, but they answer different questions: Capital Planning asks "what will this cost over the next several years," Financial Planning asks "are we on budget right now."
The core concept: Budget Categories
Everything in Financial Planning is organized around Budget Categories — a budgeted amount for a defined period, compared automatically against real spend. See Budget Categories for how they're set up.
Actual spend isn't entered manually — it's pulled automatically from activity across FMX. See How Actual Spend Is Tracked for where that data comes from.
No approval workflow
Budget Categories are a tracking and reporting tool, not a request that gets approved or denied. There's no submission or approval step — a budget category is simply active, upcoming, expired, or retired based on its date range.
Whether your organization uses this
Financial Planning is a standalone licensed product. If you don't see budget categories in your navigation, your organization hasn't licensed it.