Budget planning

Budgets are powerful tools that you can use in financial planning and reporting. Many reports and dashboards in Sage Intacct include budget information that helps you monitor your business’s progress over the course of a year, and compare actual results against your forecasted results.

Use the Budget planning page (Budgets > All > Budget planning) to access Sage Intacct Planning, import budgets from a spreadsheet or other tool, or create a budget manually.

Prerequisites

Before you can create or import a budget, several items in Sage Intacct must be set up:

• Reporting periods to be used for budgeting: Reporting periods must exist and must have the Use for budgeting checkbox selected. Reporting periods used for budgeting are typically monthly. Also, the reporting periods used for budgeting cannot overlap.

  For example, you cannot use all the following reporting periods for budgeting in a given year because they overlap:

  • January

  • February

  • March

  • First Quarter

  Learn more about reporting periods.

• Accounts: Each account that needs a budget must exist in the chart of accounts. Learn more about creating accounts.
• Dimensions: You can use dimensions such as Location, Department, and Employee in a budget, but dimensions are not required. Learn more about planning a budget with dimensions.

Create a named budget

No matter how you’re going to add your budget, you need to start with a named budget.

Go to Budgets > All and select Add (circle) beside Budgets repository. Provide a Budget ID and Description.

Make any other selections and save your budget. You can now use that budget to provide details or as the container into which you can import a prepared budget.

Integrate with Sage Intacct Planning

When you open the Budget planning page, you'll see a link to log in to Sage Intacct Planning with budgets.

With Sage Intacct Planning, you can skip the manual spreadsheet imports. The bidirectional integration between Planning and Intacct means that you can share data for budgets, including your chart of accounts, dimension data, actuals, existing budgets, and more.

When you're ready to create a budget in Planning, a wizard guides you through the process. You can select which accounts and dimensions to use, combine accounts into one budget line, and use your dimensions to create a budget structure.

Learn more about using Sage Intacct Planning with Intacct.

Import a prepared budget

It's common to create a budget using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet program. Creating a budget in spreadsheet form allows you to upload large volumes of data. The spreadsheet can include all account and dimension combinations.

For more information, see Import a budget.