Enter the year of your budget from the Up and Down arrows, and select the budget type. P&L button type is selected automatically, since it’s the most common budget used by businesses. Click Next when you finish.
2. On the Additional Profit & Loss Budget Criteria window, select one of the three available criteria.
Note that “No additional criteria” means your budget is based on P&L accounts only (type 1 from the four types discussed above).
Select Customer:Job button for a budget based on your company P&L accounts in relation to your customers or jobs (type 2), or
Select Class button for a budget based on your company P&L accounts in relation to classes (type 3).
Click Next once you are done.
3. On “Choose how you want to create a budget” window, select Create budget from scratch button if you don’t have any existing budget. Click Finish.
4. Set Up Budgets wizard is opened which shows all your P&L accounts along its vertical rows and your fiscal period (monthly) across its horizontal columns.
Let’s fill in the budget values and take a look at a shortcuts at the lower left side of the window.
• Copy Across.
This is to copy a value from one cell to another cells in the same row. In this example, $ 100,000 is filled in January Sales, click Copy Across button, and the same amount is copied to all cells from February to December.
If you only want to copy it to certain cells, you can do it, too. For example, the Payroll Expenses is budgeted for $30,000 for Jan-Jun and $35,000 for Jul-Dec. What you have to do is type $30,000 and Copy Across it, and type $35,000 in July and Copy Across it.
• Adjust Row Amounts.
This is to allow an increase or decrease of monthly value by a certain amount or percentage. For example, your COGS is $40,000 for January and you budget them to increase by 1% in each month after compounding. You then need to firstly Copy Across $40,000 and then click Adjust Row Amounts, while your cursor is at Feb column.
You will see Adjust Row Amounts window, select “Increase each remaining monthly amount in this row by this dollar amount or percentage” button and fill in 1%.
Then, select Enable compounding. The result is as shown above in the COGS row.
• Clear.
This button is to clear all the values for a budget, to start your budget all over again.