Budget vs Actuals

This is a common type of business chart, where the progress to date is overlayed on a 'backcloth' of budget. The cumulative deviation is also shown, and changes to a dotted line at the point where reality reverts to forecast.

The data is very typical of large corporate finance departments. The budget represents a promise to head office, and the forecast for the last few months of the year becomes ever more unrealistic as everyone struggles to hide how far behind plan they are falling. This style of chart makes the problem very clear!

This chart created with GraPL; to build it automatically from a script or server use GraPL.NET.