Driver-based vs historical modelling
bluprnts builds your forecast from operational drivers — products, sales, people, costs, financing — and derives the accounting, rather than projecting your books forward.
bluprnts is driver-based. You describe how the business works — what you sell, at what price, to how many people, with what staff and what costs — and the profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow are derived from that.
The alternative, which most cash flow tools use, is historical extrapolation: connect an accounting system and project the numbers already in it forward.
The difference#
| Driver-based | Historical | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts from | Operational decisions you control | Accounting data you've already recorded |
| Needs books | No | Yes |
| Models a decision | Directly — the decision is the input | Only as an adjustment to a trend |
| Speaks in | Products, people, sales, spend | Ledger accounts |
What it means in practice#
You can forecast before you have books. Pre-revenue, a new venture, a new product — there's nothing to extrapolate, and nothing needs to be.
Decisions are the inputs. "Hire three people, launch at £X, raise £Y" are things you type in, not adjustments layered on a trend line. That's what makes scenario planning native rather than bolted on.
Changing one thing moves everything downstream. Raise a price and the revenue, margins, tax, cash and runway all recalculate, because each is derived from the layer before it. See How forecasts are built.
The numbers are traceable. Every figure has a path back to a driver — see Provenance & traceability.
Where accounting data fits#
As an input, not the engine. Connecting Xero fills in your opening position from real figures and lets you compare closed months against plan. The forecast is still built from your drivers. See Xero integration overview.
The honest limit#
Driver-based means the forecast is exactly as good as your assumptions. It won't tell you your volumes are optimistic — it will tell you, precisely and traceably, what happens if they are. That's what scenarios are for.
Learn more#
The wider discipline is covered in Learn.
Related#
- How forecasts are built — the calculation order.
- What bluprnts is — the product in one page.
- What scenarios are — modelling decisions.