The Version dimension in SAC Planning: Actual, Budget, Forecast

The Version dimension is the single most important concept in SAP Analytics Cloud Planning — and the one most often misunderstood by people coming from Excel. It is what lets the same model hold your Actuals, your Budget and several Forecasts side by side, compare them, and protect each from the other. Get it right and your planning model is clean and auditable; get it wrong and you end up with the spreadsheet chaos you were trying to escape. This guide explains what the Version dimension is, the difference between public and private versions, and how to structure Actual / Budget / Forecast properly.

What the Version dimension actually does

Every SAC Planning model has a special, built-in dimension called Version (technically the category dimension). It is not a normal dimension you create — it ships with the model — and it answers one question for every number stored: which scenario does this figure belong to? The same account, entity and period can hold a completely different value in Actual than in Budget, because the Version keeps them in separate "layers" of the same model. That separation is the whole point: it lets you put plan and reality next to each other and compute the variance.

The standard categories: Actual, Budget, Forecast

SAC organizes versions into a few standard categories, and understanding them is the foundation:

• Actual — the real, recorded figures, usually loaded from your ERP (S/4HANA, BW). Actuals are read-only in planning: you report on them, you don't plan into them.
• Budget — the approved annual plan, typically locked once signed off. It is your reference point for the year.
• Forecast — the regularly updated view of where you now expect to land, blending year-to-date Actuals with a re-planned remainder. Most teams run several (Forecast Q1, Forecast Q2…).
• Planning — a working category for scenarios and what-ifs before they become an official Budget or Forecast.

A clean model names versions consistently — "Budget 2026", "Forecast 2026.Q2" — so anyone opening it understands the landscape at a glance.

Public versus private versions — the distinction that matters

This is the part Excel users miss, and it is the source of most confusion. SAC gives every planner two kinds of version:

A private version is your personal sandbox. When you start editing, you can work in a copy that only you see. You can try aggressive assumptions, break things, and recalculate freely without affecting anyone else's numbers. Nothing you do is visible to colleagues until you decide to share it.

A public version is the shared, official layer everyone sees. When your private work is ready, you publish it to the public version — that is the deliberate moment your numbers become real for the organization. Publishing is the planning equivalent of "save and commit": before it, your edits are provisional; after it, they are the figures of record.

This two-step model — edit privately, publish publicly — is exactly what spreadsheets lack, and it is why SAC scales to many planners without people overwriting each other. If your team is fighting over a shared file, this is the feature that solves it.

Comparing versions: the reason it all exists

Because Actual, Budget and Forecast live in the same model on the same dimension, comparing them is trivial: you build a calculated measure for the variance (Actual minus Budget, or Forecast minus Budget) and a Story shows the gap by account, entity and period without any data movement. This is the payoff of a well-structured Version dimension — variance analysis becomes a property of the model, not a manual reconciliation exercise. A finance team that has wrestled three spreadsheets together every month will feel the difference immediately.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Planning into Actual. Actuals come from the source system and stay read-only. If you find yourself typing into Actual, your model design is wrong.
• Too many public versions. Every planner publishing their own public version creates noise. Keep public versions few and official; do exploration in private versions.
• Forgetting to publish — or publishing too early. Unpublished work is invisible to others (good for drafts, bad if you thought it was shared). Publishing half-finished numbers is worse. Treat publish as a deliberate checkpoint.
• Inconsistent naming. "Bud2026", "Budget_26", "B26" in the same model is how trust erodes. Pick one convention.
• No data locking on the Budget. Once a Budget is approved, lock it so it cannot drift. SAC's data locking exists precisely for this.

Where this fits

The Version dimension is the backbone of any planning build — budgeting, rolling forecasts and the regulatory models alike. Our annual budget and rolling forecast templates come with the version structure already in place, so you start from a clean Actual / Budget / Forecast layout instead of designing it from scratch. To get the rest of the model right, the companion piece is choosing the correct aggregation on each measure — versions and aggregations together are what make a planning model trustworthy. Not sure which template fits? Let the assistant recommend one.