In the P&L planner, most lines are a single forecast row. When you want to plan a line at a finer grain — Software split by vendor, Payroll split by department — you break it out. The line becomes a set of child rows, one per member, and the original line turns into their running total, so the plan always ties.
Breaking a line out
- Hover an account row and click the split icon next to its name.
- Pick one or more dimensions to split by (e.g. Vendor, or Vendor and Department together). Each dimension you add makes a finer cross-tab of rows.
- For each dimension, choose how many members to keep — Smart, Top N, or Custom (see below).
- Watch the live count — how many combinations have history, how many never had spend, and how much of your spend is covered — then click Break out.
How many members to keep
- Smart — the default. If the line has only a handful of members, it keeps them all. If it has many, it keeps the ones that matter (each at least 2% of the last twelve months of spend, up to fifteen) and folds the long tail into a single Other row. A short line never gets a needless “Other.”
- Top N — keep the N biggest members by spend; the rest fold into Other.
- Custom — hand-pick exactly the members you want to see.
Whichever you choose, Potenza shows a coverage figure — “keeps 12 of 87 · 94% of L12M spend” per dimension, and an overall “covers 96% of L12M spend.” It tells you how much of the real spend keeps its own row versus folding into Other, so you can tell at a glance whether you’re losing anything important.
Members without history
The member picker shows this account’s real spend history by default, so the list stays short. Every other member of the dimension from your Data Library is available too — search to reveal them (each marked no history). You can plan a row for one even though it never had spend here: it seeds to zero and you type the forecast. New vendors and departments are always added in Data Library, not typed into a model, so they appear in every model at once; the picker’s Don’t see it? Add it in Data → link takes you straight there.
You can add the same combination more than once — two Sales · Chipotle rows for two different reasons, say. Each extra row gets a hidden reference id; turn on the Forecast ID column (from Columns) to tell them apart. Reporting always adds rows with the same combination back together.
Adding a forecast row
Under a broken-out line, Add forecast creates one more row inline — no dialog. You get a dropdown for each dimension, and each one defaults to “Other” (the residual). Narrow only the dimensions you care about, then click Add: pick Vendor: Chipotle and leave Department at Other to forecast Chipotle across the un-named departments, or pick both to forecast a specific combination. Anything you leave at Other stays part of the residual.
You can narrow a dimension the line isn’t split by yet — say the line is by Department and you pick a Vendor. Potenza simply adds Vendor to the breakout: your existing rows keep their values (their Vendor becomes “Other”) and your new vendor row joins them. New members come from Data Library, and the new row seeds to zero, ready to type. Press Esc to cancel. This adds a row within the line — it doesn’t create new P&L accounts.
Things to know
- Empty combinations (ones that never had spend) are off by default so the grid stays small; tick the box to add them as zero rows.
- Remove a breakout with the × on the line — its children sum back into a single editable row, so nothing is lost.
Assign vs. break out
Sometimes a whole line belongs to one member and you don’t want to split it into rows — all of Legal & Professional is the Operationsdepartment, say. Use Assign (the tag icon on a line) to tag the whole line with a member for reporting, without breaking it out. You can assign one member per dimension, and more than one dimension to the same line.
Assign and break out are mutually exclusive on a line: a broken-out line already carries its dimension on its child rows, so the tag icon is hidden there, and breaking out a line clears its assignments. Assignments don’t change any numbers — they’re stored for department-level reporting (coming soon).
Breakouts and assignments are saved per planning model, so the same account can be split or tagged differently in different scenarios.