Understanding Budgets

The Budgeting feature in General Ledger provides a simple and flexible means to create and manipulate your budgets.  Even if you do not use formal budgeting, the ability to manipulate multiple what if situations can be very helpful in planning your future financial picture.

Working with budgets is a two-step process:

1. Create the budget by copying from a variety of data sources.  You can limit the accounts and specify markups as part of the copy routine.

2. Maintain specific details for the accounts in the new budget.

Budget Features:

• Create New Budget:

• Copy accounts and amounts from a variety of data sources including the current Chart of Accounts, a history year, or another existing budget.

• Copy only a range of Account Numbers into the new budget.

• Specify a method for manipulating the new budget amounts, including copying the exact amounts from the source, marking up the amounts by percentage, marking down the amounts by percentage, or zeroing out the amounts.

• Sort the budget data by specific Account Elements.

• Budget Maintenance:

• Display columns for comparing the budget to other sources of data including actuals, history, and other existing budgets.

• Maintain the Budget Amounts for specific Periods within individual Account Numbers.

• Copy amounts from another column.

• Force a Budget Amount into every Period for a specific account.

• Distribute the total Budget Amount for an account evenly among the Periods.

• Change the Budget Amount based upon a percentage of the account's amount in another budget.

• Print a budget or a budget worksheet using the Budget Report.

• Attach budget information to the G/L Management Reports.