What scenarios are
Scenarios in bluprnts are parallel what-if versions of your whole forecast — bend sales, costs, headcount, timing or funding and compare the results.
A scenario is a named set of what-if adjustments bluprnts applies on top of your plan. It does not change anything you have entered: your products, sales, employees, costs and financing stay exactly as they are, and the scenario bends the assumptions around them — volume up 40%, headcount down 25%, customers paying 30 days later — so the whole forecast recalculates as a complete alternative version of the business.
Scenarios live under What-if in the left sidebar, on the Scenarios page.
Every scenario is a whole forecast#
A scenario is not an annotation or a note against a number. When one is applied, bluprnts re-runs the engine and rebuilds everything downstream of it — the profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow statement, bank balance, runway and breakeven. Two scenarios are therefore two complete, internally consistent forecasts, which is what makes comparing them worth anything.
That also means a scenario can never leave your plan in a strange state. The adjustments are stored separately from the drivers they act on, so switching back to base restores the committed plan exactly.
Base is the thing everything is measured against#
The Base card sits at the top of the scenario rail and is always there. It is your current plan with every lever at its default — "Baseline · every lever at default" — and it is not something you edit from this page. To change base, change the plan itself on the Products, Sales, Employees, Costs and Financing pages.
Every scenario in the rail shows its distance from base as a profit difference, so the list reads as a set of answers rather than a set of settings.
What a scenario can change#
Eleven levers, in four groups:
| Group | Levers |
|---|---|
| Sales | Sale volume, sale price |
| Costs | Production cost, storage & distribution, shipping, overheads |
| People | Headcount, average salary |
| Timing & funding | Customer pay delay, supplier pay delay, new funding |
On top of those, targeted impacts narrow a change to a single product, channel, department, role or cost — "+20% headcount, sales team only" — while everything else keeps following the levers. See Edit a scenario's assumptions.
When to reach for one#
Use a scenario when the question is about the whole business under different assumptions:
- Can we afford to hire three more people this year?
- What happens to cash if our biggest customer pays 60 days late?
- Do we still reach breakeven if volume comes in 20% under plan?
- What does a £500k raise actually buy us?
Use a project instead when you are adding a discrete new initiative with its own products, sales, people and costs — see Scenarios vs projects.
Related#
- Create a scenario — build one from a preset or from scratch.
- Set the working case — choose which version the rest of the app reads.
- How forecasts are built — why a change to one assumption moves numbers everywhere.