Budgets by account

A budget is a plan for the income statement: an amount per account per month, for one fiscal year. You build it in a spreadsheet-style grid, and the Budget vs. Actuals report lays it beside what actually posted.

Creating one

New budget asks for a name, the fiscal year, and what to start from:

• A blank sheet - every cell empty.
• A year’s actuals - last year’s postings, on the accrual or cash basis you pick, optionally adjusted by a percentage (+10 raises every amount 10%) and rounded to whole dollars or hundreds.
• Another budget - a copy, with the same adjust and rounding options.
• A QuickBooks budget - a budget you keep in QuickBooks, account by account. Every QuickBooks account it names must already be in your chart; refresh the chart from QuickBooks first if the import stops on one.

The fiscal year is named for the year it ends in, following your fiscal year setting. The first budget you create for a year becomes its primary - the one the reports use unless you choose another - and you can move that star to any budget of the year from the list.

The grid

Rows are the accounts of your income statement, grouped the way the profit and loss groups them, with gross profit, net operating income and net income computed as you type. Columns are the twelve months of the fiscal year and a total.

• Type into a cell and move with the arrow keys, Tab and Enter, like a spreadsheet.
• Paste a block copied from a spreadsheet; it lands where the cursor is. Cells that would fall outside the grid are skipped, and values that are not numbers are left as they were - the toast says how many of each.
• A row’s menu can spread the total evenly across the months, spread it like last year (in last year’s proportions), copy last year outright, or clear the row.
• Show FY actuals adds last year’s figures under each row for reference.
• Copy as spreadsheet text puts the whole grid on the clipboard.

Amounts are in the account’s normal direction - a contra account, marked as such, is entered positive too. Nothing is saved until you press Save; leaving with unsaved edits asks first. If someone else saved the same budget while you had it open, your save is refused and the grid offers to reload rather than overwrite their work.

Locking, archiving, deleting

• Lock a budget once it is approved: it stays visible everywhere and cannot be edited until it is unlocked.
• Archive a budget to take it off the list and out of the reports without losing it; Show archived brings it back into view, and Restore puts it back.
• Delete removes the budget and every amount in it, for good. Archive is the safer choice when in doubt.

Reading the plan against the books

Budget vs. Actuals (Reports → Financial statements) is the profit and loss with the budget beside it: for each column, the actual, the budget, the dollars over or under, and the actual as a percentage of budget. Pick the budget at the top - the year’s primary by default - and use the statement’s own controls for the period, columns by month or quarter, and basis. Over-budget income reads as favourable and over-budget cost as unfavourable, so the colour tells you which way a number went before you read it.

The budget is planned in whole months. When the statement’s period starts or ends mid-month, the budget column carries the full month’s amount and the footnote says so.

The report’s CSV, PDF and Excel downloads carry the same columns. A budget also downloads on its own from the list, as Budget Overview: the plan by account and month, with the group totals.

When an account changes

A budget references accounts by their identity, not their name or number, so renaming or renumbering an account leaves its plan in place. An account with a budget cannot be deleted; deactivate it instead, and its row stays in the grid behind Show inactive accounts.