Budgets

Grouping Accounts for Budgeting

Go to Accounting > Configuration > Budgetary Positions. Before creating any budget, decide how you want to group your chart of accounts for planning purposes — this is a one-time setup that every future budget reuses.

Creating a Position

1. Click Create.
2. Name – e.g. "Marketing Expenses", "Salaries", "Product Revenue".
3. Accounts – select every GL account that should count toward this position. A position typically maps to one or more expense/income accounts, not a single account, so a budget line can track a whole category at once.

Design Tips

• Keep positions aligned with how your P&L is already grouped (Cost of Revenue, Operating Expenses categories) so budget variance reads naturally against the P&L.
• Don't let positions overlap (the same account in two positions) — it double-counts that account's actuals across both budget lines.
• Create separate revenue and expense positions rather than one broad "everything" position, so favourable/unfavourable variance stays meaningful.

Beyond a Single Company-Wide Budget

Because each budget line can carry an Analytic Account, you can run several parallel budgets scoped to whatever you track analytically — departments, projects, cost centers, or product lines (see the Accounting course's analytic accounting coverage).

Typical Setups

• One budget per department – each department head owns and is measured against their own budget lines.
• One budget per project – planned vs actual cost for a specific client project, feeding project profitability alongside the Projects course's own profitability report.
• Consolidated view – a company-wide budget with lines split by analytic account still rolls up to one overall Budget vs Actual total when you need the big picture.

Make sure every relevant journal entry (bills, expenses, timesheets) is actually tagged with the right analytic account at entry time — a budget can only track what's tagged; untagged transactions silently fall outside every departmental/project budget while still hitting the company total.

Planning Spend Before It Happens

A budget lets you set planned income/expense targets for a period and then continuously track actual performance against them — turning "did we overspend on marketing this quarter?" from a manual spreadsheet exercise into a live report.

Core Concepts

Budget Statuses

• Draft – being built.
• Confirmed – submitted for approval.
• Validated – approved and active for tracking.
• Done – period closed.
• Cancelled.