Overview of Budgeting

Use budgeting to enter estimated account balances for a specified range of periods. You can use these estimated amounts to compare actual balances with projected results, or to control actual and anticipated expenditures.

General Ledger gives you a variety of tools to create, maintain, and track your budgets, including the ability to upload budget amounts from your spreadsheet software.

To use General Ledger budgeting:

  1. Define a budget to represent specific estimated cost and revenue amounts for a range of accounting periods. You can create as many budget versions as you need for a ledger. See: Defining Budgets.

    You can create budget hierarchies by assigning a master budget to lower-level budgets. This enables you to track budgeted amounts against a control budget. See: Creating Master/Detail Budgets.

  2. Define budget organizations to represent the departments, cost centers, divisions, or other groups for which you enter and maintain budget data. You can also define one general budget organization that includes all accounts. If you are using budgetary control, you set the budgetary control requirements for an account within its budget organization. Assign a password to each budget organization to restrict access to budget account balances. See: Defining Budget Organizations.

  3. Enter the budget amounts. There are several methods you can use to enter your budget amounts:

  4. Calculate budget amounts to update budget balances from your budget and MassBudget formulas. You should calculate budgets after you revise existing formulas, or whenever the balance of any account you use in a budget formula changes. See: Calculating Budget Amounts and Generating MassBudget Journals.

  5. Perform online inquiries to review budget information. Use the Account Inquiry window to display complete budget balances, as well as actual or encumbrance balances. Use the Budget Inquiry window to compare summary balances between your master and detail budgets, and check for budget violations. See: Performing a Budget Inquiry.

  6. Use the Financial Statement Generator to design a wide variety of reports that include budget information. These reports can include budget, actual, variance and variance percentage amounts. See: Overview of the Financial Statement Generator.

  7. Define and run a consolidation to consolidate budget balances between ledgers. See: Defining Consolidation Definitions.

  8. Freeze your budgets to prevent accidental or unauthorized changes. You can freeze all or part of a budget. See: Freezing Budgets.

  9. Translate budget balances to create budget versus actual reports in your reporting currency using the Financial Statement Generator. You can also generate reports comparing different versions of your budgets in your reporting currency. See: Translating Balances.

Reporting Currencies

If you are using Reporting Currencies (Journal or Subledger Transaction Level), you can define budgets and budget organizations in your reporting currency and enter budget amounts or journals directly in the reporting currency budget. Budget amounts and budget journals entered in your source ledger, such as your primary or secondary ledger, are not automatically converted in your reporting currency (journal or subledger transaction level).

Related Topics