Budgets and budget against actual

A budget is your plan for the year. You give each income or expense account an amount for each month. Pop Books then shows how the real figures compare with the plan.

Find budgets under Insights, on the Budgets tab.

What to do

1. Open Insights, then Budgets, then choose New budget.
2. Give it a name, such as Original or Revised, and a year.
3. Choose Start from:

- From scratch (empty), to type every amount yourself. - From last year's actual figures, optionally raised or lowered by a percent. Use a minus sign to lower it. - From the average of the last few months you choose. You can tick Follow last year's seasonal shape so busy months stay busy.

1. Choose Make the budget, then Open it. Each row is one account. Choose Edit on a row to change its twelve months, or Add account to add a row.
2. To see how you are doing, scroll to Budget against actual. Pick the first and last month. The table shows the budget, the actual figure, the difference and the difference as a percent. Use PDF or Excel to save it.

Versions and the current budget

• You can keep several budgets for one year. Use Make a new version to copy one, with an optional percent change.
• Choose Make current on the one you trust. The dashboard compares against the current budget only.
• Export to Excel and Import from Excel work with these columns: Code, Account, Option, then Jan to Dec. A file made by Export has this shape. An import is all or nothing. If one row has an unknown code or a bad amount, nothing is imported and the message names the row.

Good to know

• Amounts are positive in the account's own direction. The difference is actual minus budget.
• Accounts that have actual figures but no budget are shown against zero.
• A budget is per account, and optionally per tracking option. A budget for a mix of two tracking categories has not been built.
• The report builder can show a budget column. Pick a saved budget, and the column reads it for the dates of that column.
• Changing a budget needs permission to set up the books or to write entries. Anyone who can read reports can see it.
• Budgets are plans only. They never change your books.
• The Budgets tab was checked by the automatic tests of the engine. It has not yet been tried by a person on a phone-sized screen.