Budgets

What is it and what is it for?

A budget is a document with a name, optionally linked to a Subsidiary, Location, Department, Item Class, Division or Project, that holds a table of amounts: one row per ledger account you want to budget and one column per accounting period (typically the 12 months) of the year you're planning.

It serves three main purposes:

• Plan ahead how much you expect to spend or earn on each account, month by month.
• Compare it afterward against what's actually Executed in your ledger and what's already Ordered on authorized purchases, so you know how much availability is left.
• If your company turns on Budget Control, use it to warn or block transactions that would exceed what's available on an account.

Each budget line can carry its own currency: leave it blank and the amount is used as-is; set a currency and AdmCloud converts it in the reports using the current exchange rate (or the average rate you set on the report, if your company has that feature enabled).

How to use it

1. Open the Budgets list and use the New button to pick how to start: an empty budget for the year you choose, a copy of last year's actual movements, a copy of this year's actual movements, or a copy of the amounts from a specific accounting period spread across every period of the new budget.
2. Fill in the header: Name (required), Subsidiary (if your company uses them), and optionally Location, Department, Item Class, Division, Project and Notes, so you can filter and report on it later by that dimension.
3. Fill in the table of amounts by account and period. You can type each cell by hand, or use each account's actions menu to: view its movements from last year or this year, view its historical chart, duplicate the row, copy the first amount to every period, or auto-project the year (same as last year, average of last year, linear regression, or time-series forecast).
4. If you'd rather work in Excel, use Copy table to take the whole grid to your clipboard, fill it in there, then Paste amounts to bring it back. You can also use Calculate Factor to adjust every amount at once by the same percentage.
5. If your company has per-budget user access enabled, use the Users with access section to add who can view or edit this particular budget, even without the general Budgets permission.
6. Save the budget. From the detail screen you can edit it, duplicate it, authorize it (if you have the authorization permission), or jump straight to its Report to compare budgeted against actual.

Main capabilities

• Create an empty budget, one copied from last year's or this year's actual movements, or one copied from a specific accounting period spread across the whole year.
• Automatic per-account projection: same as last year, average of last year, linear regression, or time-series (SSA) forecast.
• Copy and paste the entire amounts table to and from Excel or another spreadsheet.
• Calculate a multiplying factor to adjust every amount in the budget at once (for example, to apply a 5% increase across the board).
• Independent currency per budget line (account), automatically converted in the reports.
• Authorization workflow with three states: Pending, Authorized and Rejected.
• Restricted access: link specific users to a budget so they can view or edit it even without the general permission.
• Duplicate an existing budget to use as the base for a new one.
• A direct comparison report from the budget's detail screen, with Budget, Executed, Ordered, Availability, % Execution and a year-end Projection.

Key fields

Validations when saving

• Name is required: you can't save a budget without a name.
• Subsidiary must be editable: you can't create or edit a budget in a subsidiary marked as read-only.
• Account and period must be valid: every amount you enter must correspond to a ledger account and an accounting period that actually exist; AdmCloud rejects the save if it finds an invalid reference.
• Users with access must be valid: if you add users to the access section, each one must be a valid user with access allowed to the company, otherwise the save is rejected.
• Restricted editing: if you're only linked to a budget (without the general permission), only your changes to Notes and amounts are saved; any other change you try to make on the header is ignored.
• You must be logged into a subsidiary to create a budget, if your company uses multiple subsidiaries and you don't have permission to handle several currencies at once.

Availability, plans and conditions

• This feature requires the Enterprise edition with the Budgeting module enabled for your company. Without this module active, the screen shows a "not available on this edition" message instead of the form.
• General access is controlled with the "Budget" permission of the user group (with its Browse, Add, Edit, Delete and Authorize levels).
• If you don't have the permission to browse all budgets, the list only shows the ones you were specifically linked to in their "Users with access" section.
• The "Users with access" section of the form only appears if your company has that specific per-budget user access feature enabled.

Tips and common mistakes