Use variables in a financing plan – Financing

Use variables in a financing planFinancingYou can use the linked budget's variables in a source amount, and you know where they are defined.A source amount can use the same variables a budget formula can. They come from the **linked budget** — financing does not keep a set of its own.The groups the editor offers| Group | What it holds | | --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Phases** | the durations of the budget's work phases | | **Subtotals** | the budget's subtotal figures | | Your own groups | one branch per variable group you created in the budget — named for what you called it |The last row is not a single **User-defined** branch: every group you created in the budget's variable settings shows up under its own name, alongside Phases and Subtotals, in the Amount editor.Why this is useful in financingSubsidy rules are usually expressed in the same terms the budget already models — shooting days, crew weeks, spend in a region. If the budget carries `shootingDays` as a variable, a fund paying per shooting day is one short formula rather than a number you recompute after every schedule change.And because the variable lives in the budget, changing the schedule there moves the financing with it.Where they are definedIn the **linked budget's** variable settings — the **Variables** button in the financing toolbar opens them.That is worth stressing: you are editing the budget, not the plan. A variable added there is available to the budget's own formulas as well, and changing one moves both.A missing variable is a broken formulaIf a variable is renamed or removed in the budget, a source amount referencing it stops resolving and the Total goes blank. Same failure and same fix as any other reference — see [reference the budget in a source amount](/kb/article/reference-the-budget-in-a-source-amount).Markdown