Budget Breakdown Part III - Budget Tools

In my previous blog we took a look at entering budgets into the records. If you missed it, check out Part II of the Budget Breakdown series. Today, in Part III we will be looking at Budget Tools and some of the most used tools during budget creations within The Financial Edge.

To access the Budget Tools you must open the Budget record and go to Budget > Budget Tools. Once open the screen will look like this:

One of the frequently used tools is Copy/Forecast budget. This allows us to take an existing budget and copy it for the next year ahead. You have a few options to choose from when copying: Budget, Actuals, or Actual + Encumbrances. When creating the copy/forecast budget you will select a source scenario and destination scenario. A source scenario is the budget we are copying information from. The destination budget is where the information will be copied over too. If we look at the picture below this will show us the layout for the copy/forecast:

When you finish selecting the fields above and click Next to create the budget you copied. For example, the Budget 13 for Fiscal Year 13 will have Budget 01s information in it.

Next, we will take a look at another commonly used Budget Tool, Merge Scenarios. This will give you the option of merging scenarios into one main budget for your organization. An example of this is you have 7 departmental budgets that were generated and we need to bring them all to 1 main budget. Using this tool gives us the power to merge with just a few clicks. Just like Copy/Forecast budget, Merge scenario option is on the same Budget Tools page.

When you have selected your budgets you want to merge select Next. This takes us to the page where we select the scenario that the merged scenarios are going to. Once selected, we will click Next and then Merge Now. We now have the merged scenario created within the Budget records page.

For any information on the other Budget Tools you can click the Which option should I choose? link on Budget tools in the top right corner. This goes through further detail on the budget tools that are commonly used along with the other tools that The Financial Edge has.

We have taken a look at the most used Budget Tools within the General Ledger. This concludes the Budget Breakdown series, but stay in the loop for other blogs and series being posted to The Financial Edge blog.