Interpreting the Results of your Cost Center Budgets

After building your cost centre reports you will now want to understand best practices for interpreting the results.

Forecasting model

Any cost centre budget will have a forecast associated with it, given the budget hasn’t already been exceeded. This forecast is based on a data science model that interacts with your own budget and spend data.

The machine learning model looks at the historical spend attached to the budget. From that historical spend, it generates a prediction for future spend within the budget period. From this information, Brightflag generates a custom forecast and a predicted date-of-overrun (if relevant) with a 95% confidence interval. 

The model needs approximately 6 months of spend data to generate these results. Where there is insufficient data to generate model results or modeled uncertainty is high, the message No Forecast Available will display. 

Leveraging the results:

Share these forecasts with your financial team to get their input. If your budget is predicted to overrun, discuss the findings with each department lead within your legal function. To learn more about this, contact your company’s dedicated Brightflag Customer Success Manager to gain guidance on the next steps.

**Essential Reading**

For a detailed list of all budget types available on Brightflag, please refer to the following help articles:

• Overview of Budgeting
• Budget Requests - All You Need To Know
• Where do matter budgets appear in Brightflag?
• Estimating a Matter Budget
• Setting & Viewing Cost Centre Budgets
• Manually Reviewing Budget Requests