Report and forecast with budgets

You can design a variety of financial reports that include actuals, budgets, or a forecast using a combination of budget and actual data.

In most cases, your company already has some financial reports that use budget data, such as a "budget-to-actual" report. You can create an unlimited number of additional budget reports, by including budget columns, selecting the reporting period for which you want budget data, and selecting the budget to use.

To find your financial reports, go to General Ledger > All > Financial reporting, then select Financial reports. The Financial reports page appears with a list of your company's reports.

QuickStart Financials with budgets

Several QuickStart Financial reports are preconfigured to include budget information. For example, the “Profit and Loss - Actual vs. Budget” QuickStart Financial report includes columns for:

• Monthly budget amount
• Difference between the monthly budget and actual amounts
• Percentage variance between monthly budget and actual amounts

The actual reports available from the library depends on the QuickStart template that was used to create your organization.

Modify a budget that's being used for a financial report

In most cases, you'll have some financial reports that include budget data. If you have multiple budgets, it's likely that you'll need to edit your financial reports to refer to the correct budget. Learn more about Multiple budgets.

The budget that's being used in a given financial report is determined by the Budget ID that's selected in the report columns. For example, if you want an "Actual to budget" report to use the budget "CurrentApproved," you would need to select that Budget ID for the budget column.

To review or change the budget for a financial report:

1. On the Financial Reports list (General Ledger > All > Financial reporting > Financial reports), select Edit next to the name of the financial report to review.
2. On the Columns tab, find your budget columns. These can be 1 column or several that use different budget options:
   • Budget
   • Budget variance
   • Actual minus budget difference
   • Budget minus actual difference
   • Budget variance (normalized)
   • Actual minus budget difference (normalized)
   • Budget minus actual difference (normalized)
   • Budget ratio
3. Review the budget selected in the Budget dropdown menu.

Create financial reports with budgets

You can include budget data in the columns of your report, so that you can create any number of "budget" or "budget to actual" reports. You can even include data from more than one budget, which can be useful in evaluating changes to your budgeting over time or evaluating alternative versions of the same budget.

Here are a few of the things that you can do with a budget report

• Display budget amounts for different reporting periods
• Compare the budget to actual and display the result as an amount, percentage, or ratio
• Use budget data in other calculations

Learn more about budget to actual reports.

Use budgets for forecasting

Forecasts provide a valuable real-time analysis function that gives greater visibility into performance. You can create financial reports that include values for Remaining budget and Forecast. The Remaining Budget forecast was designed to be used with year-to-date periods and the remaining budget capabilities. It uses the Current Calendar Year Budget minus the Actual amount, as determined by the Period selected on the column. To ensure that it's used correctly, you shouldn't use this option with Inception to Date.

Transactions are not typically spread throughout a month evenly. Most of the time there are days or weeks with higher volume than others. To help with forecast reports, you can use Forecast - Full Period. This lets you forecast in a different way than the Forecast - Prorated column type.

Forecast - Full Period assumes that the budget amount is entered on the first day of the reporting period and is the full amount for the full period. It does not add any actuals for the current month. Instead, it shows historical actuals through the last full prior budgeted period, then the budget amounts for current and future periods. The Financial Report Writer uses the first of the month for months that are set up to be used for budgeting.

These functions can be used to calculate a budget forecast or the amount remaining in a budget. The remaining budget value and forecast is computed using actual amounts as of the report date along with the budgeted amount for the remainder of the periods included in the report.

 

Basics

There are a few basic steps for budget reporting and forecasting. As your needs and skills expand, you can add more variations and information to them.

1. Make sure reporting periods to use in the report are set up to be used for budgeting. Create them if necessary. Learn more about reporting periods.
2. Create or edit the budget to use as a starting point. You can choose a budget for each column on the report, if it makes sense to do so.
   
   Best practice: Give budgets a name and ID that do not reflect a specific time frame. This way, you can extend the budget instead of having to recreate it each year. For example, "ApprovedBudget" rather than "Approved2021. "
3. Go to Reports > All > Core and select Add (circle) beside Financial reports.
4. Give the new report a name and select the report structure.
5. Move to the Rows tab and add the account groups to include in the budget forecast.
6. On the Columns tab, add a column for actual, budget, budget difference, and budget variance.
7. Optionally, move to the Filters tab and filter by a dimension such as location or department.
8. Use the Format tab to make any format changes.
9. Save and run your report.

You can create variations for these reports to include things like showing budgets across multiple time periods, adding columns for forecasting, comparing different budgets (such as original and recast), and others.

For an example, see the Budget reporting and forecasting example.