QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Budgets in QuickBooks

If you want to build a budget directly in QuickBooks, the Set Up Budgets wizard is all you need. This wizard handles profit and loss budgets; balance sheet budgets; budgets for customers, jobs, and classes; and budgets built from scratch or from previous year's data.

These two setup steps are essential if you want your budgets to work properly:

• Fiscal year. QuickBooks uses the first month of your fiscal year as the first month in the budget. To check that you defined your fiscal year correctly, choose Company→Company Information. In the Company Information dialog box, head to the Report Information section, and make sure that the month in the First month in your Fiscal Year box matches the first month of your fiscal year.

• Active accounts. QuickBooks budgets cover only the accounts that are active in your Chart of Accounts. To activate any accounts that you want to budget, press Ctrl+A to open the Chart of Accounts window. Then turn on the "Include inactive" checkbox. For any inactive account that you want in your budget, click the X to the left of the account name to reactivate the account.

To start the budget wizard, choose Company→Planning and Budgeting→Set Up Budgets. Depending on whether you already have a budget in QuickBooks, the program displays two different windows, as shown in Figure 18-1.

In the first Create a New Budget screen, you must specify the fiscal year for the budget and the type of budget. QuickBooks automatically fills in the ...