How do I enter budgets?
Note: You will need to ensure budgeting is enabled in your System-Wide settings. You can see more about this in this help guide article.
To add/update the budget amounts set for each of your income and expenditure categories, you need to go to the Income & Expenditure Categories settings screen (which can be found within Settings).
Select the 'Financial Year' and 'Fund', then select the 'Budget Details' view at the top of the screen:
On-screen you will see the budget amounts per month set for each category:
Budget profiles: linear and custom
You can switch between Linear and Custom budgets by clicking on the 'Linear' or 'Custom' label in the second column. Where you are switching between these two profiles, ExpensePlus will offer you the option of how you want to switch:
- whether to convert the existing figures, or
- whether to move the total to a single month, or
- start from scratch.
You can then edit budget figures as needed:
- enter annual totals for linear budgets, and ExpensePlus will automatically calculate the monthly allocation, or
- enter monthly figures for custom budgets, and ExpensePlus will automatically calculate the annual total.
Reports
The budget amounts shown on this screen are used to calculate the 'anticipated total' that you will see on the following reports:
- Income & Expenditure (by Fund)
- Income & Expenditure (by Category Connector)
- Income & Expenditure (by Project)
Note: Budget amounts need to be entered at an income and expenditure category level. These are then summed to create the Category Group totals that you will see displayed.
Budgets in the new financial year
Budgets are set per financial year, however at year-end, as part of the end-of-year process, budget amounts get copied across to the new financial year, saving you from having to enter them from scratch. Instead, you can just make updates where there are changes, without affecting the budget amounts for any prior financial years.
Top tip: In the last 6 months of your financial year, you can set up your Categories for the next year. This process duplicates all of this year's Categories (and Category Connectors) into next year, then allows you to add, edit or delete them as you wish. Click on 'Set Up Next Year' at the top of the Income & Expenditure Categories Settings screen.
To better understand the Finance Reports module, please view the module overview video here.