QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Ways to Build Budgets

If you've just started your business, you might have a business plan that includes estimates of your income and expenses. But you won't have any existing financial data to use as a basis for a budget. Either way, there's a method for building a QuickBooks budget. And, if you're willing to import and export data, QuickBooks offers two additional ways to build budgets. Here're your options and what each has to offer:

• From scratch. This is the most tedious method, but also your only option when you don't have budget numbers or existing data to use. Although you do have to type all the numbers, you only have to use this approach for your first budget.

• From previous year's data. If you have at least a year's worth of data in QuickBooks, you can build next year's budget using your previous year's actual income and expenses. No two years are the same, but it's much easier to use existing data as a starting point and edit only the values that change.

• From previous year's budget. If you created a budget for the previous year, you can use it as the basis for next year's budget. Although you might consider this a standard business task, copying budgets requires some exporting and importing games in QuickBooks (page 447).

• From data in another program. If you build budgets in another program or export QuickBooks budgets to work out what-if scenarios, you can import budget data into QuickBooks.