Cost Control
You can close every account's forecast as part of an import, and you know what you are giving up by doing it.
The import's **Options** step carries one checkbox with real consequences: **Consolidate account predictions**.
Ticked, every account the import touches has its forecast set to expected plus paid, and its Free driven to zero — the same operation as [consolidate an account](/kb/article/consolidate-an-account), applied across the import in one pass.
Account prediction = 100. A cost item with amount 60 is now imported. If the option is NOT selected, the account prediction remains at 100, paid are 60, remainder is 40. If the option is selected, the account prediction drops to 60, paid are 60, remainder is 0.
The €40 is the forecast's headroom, and ticking the box discards it — for every account in the import.
The dialog's own condition: *Select this option when you do not expect any further costs.*
That is a real situation — a production wrapping, a final accounting run, closing a period where each account has had its last invoice. Consolidating in bulk is exactly right there, and doing it account by account would take an afternoon.
**Any import into a running production.** Mid-shoot, most accounts have plenty still to spend, and consolidating tells the set the opposite. Every forecast drops to what happens to have been booked, every Free goes to zero, and the whole set reads on budget.
It is a comfortable-looking mistake: nothing errors, no warning appears, and the numbers look tidier than before. The damage shows up the following month, when the next invoices land and every account goes negative at once — with no forecast left to explain them.
The step directly above this one offers *Do you want to create a copy of the cost control dataset before you import accounting data? (recommended)*.
Take it whenever you tick consolidate. Consolidation overwrites forecasts and cannot be undone in one step; the copy is the only route back to how the set read before — see [copy a cost control set](/kb/article/copy-a-cost-control-set).
Leave it unticked. An unconsolidated set with stale forecasts is a set you can still fix account by account. A consolidated one has already thrown the forecasts away.
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