General Ledger Budgeting

A general ledger budget is a plan for the revenue and expense accounts in your general ledger, typically used to maintain control over costs. You can enter general ledger budgets on an enterprise-wide basis or by organization.

You develop budgets at the beginning of each fiscal year and monitor them on a regular basis. If you use multiple companies, you can also use consolidation groups to consolidate budgets for a set of companies, or for a specific company in the group.

Use the General Ledger Budget form to complete any of the following actions:

• Create new budgets from scratch or create new budgets by copying and modifying existing budgets.
• Import accounts from the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, or another budget.
• Copy amounts and/or import amounts from the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, or another budget.
• Enter a reference budget amount. This allows you to adjust the annual amount while maintaining a record of the original annual amount.
• For accounts that have no variation in activity by period, distribute an annual budget amount evenly over a number of periods. For example, if you enter an annual amount of $12,000 for account 810.00, Rent Income, and you have specified 12 periods, DPS distributes $1,000 to each period.
• For accounts whose activity varies by period, distribute an annual budget amount on a period-by-period basis. For example, your enterprise may experience higher vacation expenses during the summer months. Therefore, you may choose to budget account 712.00, Vacation, on a period-by-period basis, with a higher budget for the summer months.
• Compound the annual budget. Distribute an annual amount incrementally (by percentage or amount) over each successive period specified. For example, if you enter an annual amount of $12,000 for account 773.00, Depreciation - Automobiles, and specify a compound rate of 10% over 12 periods, DPS calculates a base amount of $561 for the first period. Then it calculates the second period amount by increasing the amount in the first period by 10% ($561 + $56 = $617). Each successive period amount is increased in the same way. This allows you to more accurately budget accounts, such as depreciation accounts, that accrue at regular intervals each period.
• Adjust the annual budget. You can adjust the period amounts by a set amount or percentage for each period. For example, you may experience an increase in rental income halfway through the year. For account 810.00, Rent Income, you can enter a $100 adjustment amount for periods 7 through 12. The amounts in each of the periods 7 through 12 increase by $100.
• Consolidate multiple budgets. You can merge budget data from several budgets into a single budget. You may find this useful if you want to track budget data by organization, while still maintaining separate budgets for individual departments within each organization.
• Print budgets.
• Delete budgets.

After you establish general ledger budgets, you can use the Profit Planning Monitor, a general ledger report that draws information from your general ledger budgets, to monitor budget information.