The answer is—as often—more emotional than rational: Excel feels familiar. But it’s usually a source of unnecessary complexity as well. Still, you forgive, thinking, ‘It’s just the way it is.’
Later, you find yourself fixing issues instead of planning and forecasting. Trying to understand why numbers stopped matching what you see in Qlik. And, probably, you ask yourself:
“Did someone shift a column so formulas broke?”
“Who’ll go over all these versions multiplied across emails?”
“Where do I find extra hours for consolidation?
The irony is that Qlik already provides a single source of truth, so your entire budgeting process can stay inside Qlik. Imagine structure, governance, real-time clarity—all built in from the start.
Excel and Qlik are not enemies. Excel handles editing, not governance; Qlik handles governance, not editing.
Excel gives you flexibility. That’s why people still run entire budgeting cycles in spreadsheets. But this flexibility is very fragile and often results in silos, mismatches, general nervousness, and face-palming across departments.
Qlik gives you structure. A single source of truth, clean relationships, governed data, fast analytics, and one shared view of reality for the whole business. But what it doesn’t offer by default is the interactive layer you need for budgeting. No editable fields, no approval workflows, versioning, or the ability to lock down numbers once they’re agreed.
Thanks for reading up to here. Now, the positive part comes!
Now that we confirmed and named the problem—the limits of Excel and Qlik on their own—it’s time to name the solution, too: Inphinity. Inphinity is a planning and action layer built on top of Qlik.
It allows you to enter, store, and govern budget data directly where your actuals already live, without exporting anything to Excel. It’s basically bringing action into BI—turning your existing Qlik app into a fully functional budgeting environment.
If you prefer to watch the webinar before reading, click here.
Before you make any table editable, you need a place to store the new values. Qlik alone can’t store user-entered data, so the first step is to create a dedicated storage table in Inphinity Forms. This table becomes the home for your budget: every change, every version, every approval, every edit. Once the storage exists, you simply link your Qlik object to it. From that moment on, anything you enter in Qlik—numbers, comments, adjustments—is written into this data store. One technical step, and your Qlik app suddenly becomes capable of planning, not just analyzing.
Once you have the storage in place, you take the table you normally use for analysis and convert it into an editable Inphinity Forms object. The structure stays the same—country, product, months—but now you can type into it. You add editable fields for the months you want to plan, choose the number format, set validation rules, and define which fields are visible to which users. From that moment on, your Qlik table is no longer a static view of last year’s numbers. It becomes an input surface where your team can actually build the budget.
Every budget needs a baseline. You can bring last year’s numbers into your editable table in two ways: either paste them directly from Excel, or prefill them automatically using the actuals already loaded in your Qlik data model. Both methods give you an immediate starting point that aligns with your reporting. And because the structure matches your existing Qlik app, the prefill is clean, fast, and repeatable for every new budgeting cycle.
With your baseline in place, you can start adding logic that feels just like Excel, but runs safely inside Qlik. In Inphinity Forms, you can reference fields in the same row (for example, summing Jan–Dec into a Total column) and build simple formulas that calculate automatically as users type. You can also add validation rules to prevent negative values, enforce mandatory inputs, or highlight outliers.
Once people start entering numbers, you need a way to decide which values are still “in progress” and which are final. That’s where an approval field comes in. You can add a simple checkbox that, when ticked, changes the row from editable to locked based on a rule in Inphinity Forms. Managers or controllers can review and approve inputs, preventing further changes, while other users can still see the values but can no longer overwrite them. This gives you a lightweight workflow for budgeting directly in Qlik: draft → review → approve → lock, with every step fully traceable.
When someone updates a number in the budgeting table, you don’t want to wait for a full reload to see the impact. With Inphinity Forms and SSE, values stored in the data storage can be aggregated on the fly and reused in Qlik measures, KPIs, and charts. That means as soon as users save their changes, your totals, variances, and key indicators refresh instantly in the same app. You can tweak assumptions, adjust the budget, and immediately see how it affects revenue, costs, or margin—without breaking your flow.
A serious budgeting cycle doesn’t end with “we have the numbers”. You also need to know who changed what, when, and which version is currently valid. Inphinity Forms automatically tracks every change written to the budget storage, so you can see the history of edits for each row and, if needed, roll back or compare versions. You can separate draft, approved, and forecast scenarios into distinct versions and switch between them directly in Qlik. Combined with row-level rules and Qlik security, this gives you full control over your budgeting process: transparent, auditable, and ready for the next cycle.
This webinar walks through the same steps inside Qlik, from creating the data store to locking and approvals.
Excel gives you flexibility; Qlik gives you structure. Inphinity brings these two worlds together so you can work inside Qlik with the same familiar input experience you’re used to in spreadsheets—only now with governance, clarity, and control built in. You get a budgeting process that feels natural to use and reliable to manage. And the best part: you can set it up in just a few practical steps. If you want to see how this works in your environment, you can speak directly with our tech lead Guilherme.
