Bridging the Gap Between Top-Down Targets and Bottom-Up Reality

Anyone who has run an annual planning cycle knows the standoff. Leadership looks at the market and hands down a top-down revenue target of 15% growth. Meanwhile, the department leads build their budgets from the bottom up based on actual headcount, pipeline, and capacity, and usually land somewhere around 8%.

Finance then spends the next three weeks living in spreadsheets, trying to negotiate the gap between those two numbers.

When you manage this in Excel, top-down and bottom-up planning usually live in completely different workbooks. You have a high-level target sheet for the executives, a granular operational sheet for the managers, and a variance tab trying to tie them together.

Running Both in a Connected Grid

When you build your plan directly on top of your semantic model, you don't need separate workbooks for different planning motions. Because the grid understands your dimension hierarchies natively, it can handle both directions at the same time.

• The Bottom-Up Build: A regional manager can input their forecast at the granular level, say, by individual store or product category. Because the hierarchy is built into the model, those inputs immediately aggregate up to the regional and total company lines without anyone having to run a rollup script.
• The Top-Down Spread: Leadership can look at that aggregated number, decide it isn't high enough, and overwrite the consolidated regional total. The system prompts you to choose how the adjustment should be distributed, equally, by weights, or by trend, before pushing the new target back down to the granular level.

Spreading the Data

The trick with top-down adjustments is how you distribute the numbers down the hierarchy. Fabric Planning handles this through three distribution modes:

• Equal: Splits the adjustment evenly across all active descendants.
• Weights: Distributes the adjustment based on a reference measure, typically prior year actuals, so stores or products with higher historical values absorb a larger share of the new target.
• Trend: Distributes the value across time periods with a growth pattern applied, so the adjustment increases or decreases progressively across months rather than landing as a flat number in every period.

Getting Started

This dual-directional planning is a core capability of the platform, and it doesn't require writing complex DAX allocation formulas to set up. If you want to see how this works in practice, jump into Exercise E1 in the Fabric Planning training guide. It walks you step-by-step through configuring target spreading and aggregation on a real dataset.

Frequently Asked Questions