---
title: Decisions, scenarios, and outcomes
section: Financial workflows
order: 16
summary: Preview a business change against the plan, apply it atomically, and preserve the later outcome review.
---

A scenario represents proposed changes. Evaluation shows what those changes imply before they become the operating forecast. An approved decision records the change you chose and why.

## Prepare a scenario

Create a saved scenario in the workspace using supported driver, model-variable or scenario-item changes. For a fixed-driver amount correction, Financial progress can draft a change for scenario review. Formula drivers should be changed through their model inputs or formulas, not their fallback display amount.

Open `/goal-decisions` and choose the scenario and a plan for a currently active goal version. If the goal was revised, approve a baseline for the new version first.

## Evaluate all constraints

Review current and proposed results for all active cash goals, headroom, first breach month, and monthly cash across the forecast horizon. Look beyond the goal deadline for deferred consequences.

Review each manual condition with a status and supporting reason. A model calculation cannot decide that “preserve the product team” is satisfied simply because ending cash is high enough.

Per-change attribution evaluates scenario items in ID order and then stored changes in their stored order. Interactions belong to later steps. Unsupported intermediate states leave a visible residual; attribution is a model explanation, not causal proof.

## Save or approve

Save an evaluation to preserve the comparison without applying it. To change the operating model, acknowledge the limitations, provide a reason and use **Approve & apply together**.

Approval rechecks the pinned preview. Pending or failed manual conditions, cash-floor breaches, unavailable calculations and unsupported changes block application. An ending-cash target can remain below target: its visible gap can still be a management decision. A minimum-cash constraint has different approval consequences.

Supported effects, decision records, audit, financial revision, recalculation request, scenario archival and the preserved approval commit together. Monthly cash and projected accounting must reproduce the reviewed result; failures roll back the application.

## Keep expectations distinct

Changing a driver does not silently rewrite already captured obligations. Review their dates or amounts separately. Recurring approvals may become stale and require [replacement review](/docs/recurring-assumptions/).

Bounded single-payment recognition and formula items have explicit support. Unsupported recognition, entity or FX combinations remain exceptions rather than being converted into cash-only assumptions.

## Review the outcome

Later, choose **Review outcome** on an applied review. The bridge compares today’s outlook with the preserved applied outlook under its original goal version. Save this as another immutable record.

This includes subsequent activity and other decisions. It does not isolate the causal effect of the original decision.

For side-by-side downside/base/upside evaluation without applying any decision, see [Cases and sensitivity](/docs/cases-and-sensitivity/).