QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Running Budget Reports

A budget gives you a target to aim for. The Set Up Budgets window lets you type values for income and expense accounts, but it doesn’t show you whether your budget results in a net profit or loss. For that, you need a budget report (or your budget exported to a spreadsheet, as described on Copying Budgets and Creating What-if Budgets). And to see how your business is doing compared to your budget, you need a budget report that shows budget and actual numbers side by side. QuickBooks provides four types of budget reports: one to review budgets you’ve created and three to compare your performance to your plan. This section describes the various budget reports, what they’re useful for, and how to create and format them.

Note

To learn about all the options for customizing any kind of report, see Chapter 21.

The Budget Overview Report

Because the Set Up Budgets window shows your accounts and the values you enter for each month, you can’t see whether your budget actually works. The Budget Overview Report shows budget numbers for each account and month, but it also subtotals values if you use top-level accounts and subaccounts in your chart of accounts, as shown in Figure 20-6.

Figure 20-6. Although you build budgets month by month, many businesses (particularly ones with shareholders) focus on quarterly performance. To view your budget by quarter instead of by month, in ...