Auto-drafting a budget with Wally

Turtini can draft a budget for next year automatically, using your last 12 months of actuals as the baseline and FRED CPI inflation data per category to project line-item changes.

Walkthrough:

1. Open Accounting → Budgets tab.
2. Click "Draft from last year" or ask Wally: "draft a budget for next year."
3. Wally pulls your actuals from your General Ledger, groups them by category and dimension (project / team / location), and projects each line forward using the appropriate FRED CPI series:
• Wages → Employment Cost Index
• Materials → Producer Price Index for that NAICS code
• Real estate → CPI Shelter
• Software → CPI Information Services
• Travel → CPI Transportation
4. Review the draft, edit individual lines if needed, then save it as the active budget.
5. The variance dashboard now compares actuals against the new budget in real-time.

Year-end automation:
You can opt into automatic year-end re-drafting — set the toggle in Accounting → Settings → Budget Automation. On December 15 each year, Turtini drafts next year's budget using the same logic and emails you a review link. You can accept it as-is or edit before activating.

Setup requirement:
• Accounting module active
• At least 6 months of actuals on the books (otherwise the draft is too noisy to be useful)
• FRED API key set in platform secrets (admin task; not org-level)