QuickBooks 2011: 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. Profit and loss budgets; balance sheet budgets; budgets for customers, jobs, and classes; and budgets built from scratch or from previous year’s data—the Set Up Budgets wizard does it all.

Before you dive into building a budget, you have to perform two setup steps 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. At the bottom of the Company Information dialog box, make sure that the month in the “First month in your Fiscal Year” box is correct.

• Active accounts. QuickBooks budgets cover only the accounts that are active in your chart of accounts. To activate any accounts you want to budget, press Ctrl+A to open the Chart of Accounts window, and then turn on the “Include inactive” checkbox. (If no accounts are inactive, the “Include inactive” checkbox is grayed out.) For any inactive account that you want in your budget, click the X to the left of the account’s name to reactivate that account.

To start the budget wizard, choose Company→Planning & Budgeting→Set Up Budgets. Depending on whether you already have a budget in QuickBooks, the program displays one of two different wizards. The Create New Budget wizard, shown in Figure 20-1, appears if this is your first budget in this company ...