QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Copying Budgets and Creating What-If Budgets

If next year's budget is almost identical to this year's, copying your current budget and changing a few numbers would be quick and easy. But QuickBooks lacks a built-in mechanism for copying an existing budget to a new budget. Similarly, because QuickBooks only allows one budget of each type for the same fiscal year, you can't create what-if budgets to see which one is the best.

To do any kind of budget modifications beyond typing in values or using Copy Across and Adjust Row Amounts, you have to export your budgets to a spreadsheet program and make modifications or what-if copies there. Then, when you've got the budget you want, you can import the file back into QuickBooks to run Budget vs. Actual reports.

For example, you can export your QuickBooks budget into Excel and copy the budget into multiple worksheets. One worksheet could be a bare bones budget in case a shaky client disappears. A second worksheet could represent your ideal budget if you snag that big new client. And a third worksheet could be your most likely results, somewhere in between the two extremes.

A command that copies a budget would be convenient—even Quicken, Intuit's software for personal finances, has one. But once you get the hang of exporting and importing budget files, you'll barely notice the extra steps.

Note

You can't export only the budget you want to copy or play with. When you export the Budget lists in QuickBooks, the export file contains entries for ...