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Overview

Version control is a central part of budgeting, forecasting, and reporting in Francis. It allows you to take snapshots of your model throughout the year. When you’ve finalized an anchor budget or forecast, you can save versions of your model, which can be used in charts, variance analyses, and reporting.

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Basics

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Saving versions

To take a snapshot of your model and lock that version for later reference, navigate to the Versions button in the top bar and select Save version from the side drawer. Once a version has been saved, it will appear on the version timeline, where you can view older versions of your model.
Include some indication of time when naming versions. Common examples include Q1 Reforecast or conventions like 3+9 Forecast.

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Referencing versions

Saved versions enable comparison between budgets, forecasts, and actuals in Francis. For reporting purposes, versions can be included in the Reports view, which takes two versions as input: an anchor budget and a forecast, both of which would ideally have been saved as locked versions in your model. When designing charts, saved versions can be accessed through the Sources list in the toolbar. Adding saved versions to your charts makes comparing budget vs. actuals or budget vs. forecasts easy.

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Sharing versions

By default, all roles — owners, admins, editors, viewers, and limited viewers — have access to the version timeline and saved versions. It is currently not possible to restrict access to versions or to share individual versions of your model with specific users. If you wish to share specific versions with your team members but do not want to give them access to specific versions, you can export your model to Excel or Sheets or download a regular PDF, which can then be shared with your team.

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Editing versions

Saved versions represent a snapshot of your financial model at the time of saving. Therefore, versions are locked and cannot be changed or edited in any way. As an exception, actuals are updated if new entries are booked to mapped accounts for actuals months prior to the forecast start date. If you’ve just saved a version of your model and wish to make changes to that version, we recommend saving a new version that includes your updates.