How to Set Up a Budget in QBO - QBO Tutorial

hello and welcome back to the Clara CFO group Channel today we are going to talk about how to create a budget in QuickBooks online so if you have the Plus or the advanced version of QuickBooks Online you have access to a budgeting tool and if you have Simple Start or Essentials you would have to upgrade in order to be able to use the budgeting tool in QuickBooks online so if you are getting into your QuickBooks and you do not see what I am showing you the reason is because you probably don't have the product that has the budgeting tools okay so you can upgrade always for that if you did buy QuickBooks Online through us feel free to reach out we can upgrade you within a certain time period and keep your discount so if you've done that recently you can email us and we can potentially help you with a upgrade okay but if you haven't gotten QuickBooks online yet and you do want the budgeting feature just know plus or Advance is where you need to be okay before we get into the details of how to do budgeting in QuickBooks Online I would like to invite you to subscribe to this channel uh if you are watching these videos and you probably either are helping a small business with their accounting or you are running your own business with your accounting and you're looking for help and so if that's the case you've come to the right place I am absolutely here to help you with the accounting in your small business and also like help you figure out how to make better more financially sustainable and strategic decisions with your finances I'm here to hopefully make you more profitable and if that sounds good please make sure you are subscribed because that's the kind of videos we like to make over here if you haven't already checked out the financial Clarity podcast you can check that out as well that's another free resource available to you as a small business owner and uh you can check that out over at Financial Clarity podcast okay let's go ahead and talk about budgeting in QuickBooks Online um um I really like to have the ability to run a budget to actual report directly in an accounting system or in some type of software where I don't manually have to do it there are ways to have your budget in Excel and have your financials in Excel and do a bunch of vlookups and different types of formulas in order to get your budget to actual all in Excel so it is possible that you can do it but it is a pain in the butt and if anything changes or you've made a chart of accounts update or anything it's going to mess up your formulas and then it's just it takes more time and I like one click budget versus actual reports okay so you set up your budget at the beginning of the year you put it in your accounting system and then you can run your budget to actual reports all year round I really like that so I'm going to hop into QuickBooks right now and show you how to get to the budgeting section and some things to think about as you're preparing a budget now I already did a whole video a long video on how to actually budget your full p&l okay so that is a very extensive tutorial on what to think about in creating your budget so we're not going to get into that for the purposes of this video because that's already been done and and we'll make sure to link it up here so you guys can grab it and save it and watch it after this but we're not going to get into the you know how to budget for each category on this one because we've already done that what this is is tactically how to get into QuickBooks and where to find the budget and some things to think about when you're preparing a budget okay so let's go to QuickBooks all right we are here in the sample company of QuickBooks online and if you are in your main home screen you can go up to the gear icon and this is where you'll find the under Tools you will find budgeting okay and if you've never done a budget before you do have the ability to create a budget you also have the ability I think this is in I think this should be available for everybody you can import a budget as well but if you import a budget which if anybody wants to see this video let me know and we can figure out a way to do this one if you want to import a budget what you'll have to do is select your time period of what you're importing so if you're we're in 2023 right now if you're importing 2024 you would want to make sure that this is fiscal year 2024 and then you need to use the template that they give you because it's based on your p&l as it is right now and so that's how it will work so you download the CSV file upload your information into it and then you put it or you fill out your information into the CSV file and then you upload it back here okay so just something to keep in mind if that is if you've already done an Excel budget that could save you a lot of time here but we're going to talk about just creating a budget from scratch and so the first thing that you're going to want to do is set up your budget um and tell it again which time period you're budgeting for now 2023 is almost over so really we're looking at 2024 and with that we want to do a Consolidated budget this is a sub you have the option of subdivided budget or a Consolidated um most of us are going to be using Consolidated because this is the whole company together looking at it all together if you have different departments or classes or if you like to maybe budget based on location you can do that with subdivided so yeah those are options there and then there's this option to create a budget from scratch I have never used this before so we're not we're not doing that that's not the purpose of this video we're going to click next and then we're in this kind of what sort of looks like a spreadsheet it's like we're getting out of the spreadsheets to just basically look at another spreadsheet but you can rename this so if you want to call this like budget draft 2024 we're going to name this company pure joy although this information is from a landscaping company you can look at this a couple different ways you can create a budget just yearly just total annual numbers you can look at it quarter Al or you can do it monthly I highly recommend monthly for preparation of budgets because we look at our financials we should be looking at our financials on a monthly basis if you only look at them quarterly then maybe do a quarterly budget but I highly recommend you moving to a monthly basis getting those books done on a monthly basis looking at your financials on a monthly basis and with that you know you have things that are very often recurring that are monthly your payroll your um maybe your invoice happens um consistently on a monthly basis maybe your rent is paid on a monthly basis there's your software subscriptions you know there's so many things and expenses that we know that are on a monthly basis that I really like budgeting on that same basis okay so what what this is doing is it gives you a budget total tab or budget total column here and then all the months a you know across so you can do this a couple different ways so you can say okay maybe design income our budget for the year is $150,000 and then if you just put it in the total it will evenly distribute it across but you might say like okay well that's fine thank you for evenly Distributing that for me but really we don't have any work planned for January or like you know barely anything so we' really got to make it up when we get into you know maybe February we need to sell $20,000 and then we have this huge project that's happening in March you know and you can actually go through here and change this but I do kind of like the fact that you can put in a total annual budget and it will do that just across for you but if you go here and it didn't like because I I typed in these very specific numbers it's giving me a little error this doesn't match the monthly totals and if I want to split it across I can plus press this little blue button and that will help me spread that evenly across the year so that's how you input numbers into this there's a couple other ways you can get numbers in here you can actually go to your you can go to and Excel that if you already have a budget built out and you didn't upload it with a CSV and you just want to copy and paste some things in here you can actually just copy the lines that you want and then paste across so you can see I just did a contrl c and a contrl v and then that 1,5000 popped over into the budget so just make sure you copy and paste to the right place but you know that's totally an option if you're wanting to do that which is great so let me show you a couple other things so you can just go line by line and fill this out if you make a mistake and you just want to clear everything you can go to clear data and then another thing that's kind of helpful is you can copy reference data which this reference data is it's saying which is the year that you want to use as a comparison so for 2024 you're probably going to use 2023 as your your actuals as your comparison I highly recommend making your reference period based on actuals and not based on a prior budget because you need to know that the budget actually turned into something it actualized so you don't necessarily want to budget off of a budget that's prior like I have seen people do that before and I don't know why why because you just get you kind of drift further and further off from reality in that situation so you don't actually want to base it off of a prior budget you want to base it off of actuals so but it might be that maybe 2024 you expect it to be more like 2022 rather than 2023 if you know the cycles of your business so you might actually want to say hey this business in 2024 is actually more like 2022 more than anything else than 2023 so you know you do have the ability to select a reference reference point there and then you can kind of toggle back and forth so what what that is is if you select that and you want to see the reference period or you copy the reference period it you can actually just take those numbers across so you can it will say whatever was happening in 2023 let's just copy it across and so that can be really helpful for things like rent maybe Insurance maybe um some of your expenses your bank charges you know there's going to there's going to be some times where you can really use that and that will save you a lot of time or maybe you use that to build out the budget but then you go in and you change specific numbers that you know that are going to increase okay the point is is there's number of different ways to populate this budget here in um QuickBooks online and if you want to you can also show the reference data so it will pull pull in kind of this extra column where it says actuals from that period and then and your budget and then actuals from the prior reference period and then the budget so that can be kind of helpful too as you're trying to decide you know is this the right number if it's not okay so I think that's mostly what I wanted to show you guys because then when you go to run your budget to actual report in QuickBooks I would show you how to do that but for some reason the sample company here does not give me that report it's supposed to be a Plus subscription because I can use the budgeting so I don't know into it get it together um but I think the where was I going with that when you when you pull your budget to actual reports what you want to do is you'll select which budget because you can have multiple different budgets so you can compare your actuals to different budgets so just make sure you're pulling the right one when you're pulling your budget to actual reports and then you just save it and then so yeah it's saying that I can't save it you also should be able to clone or copy a budget and so if you want to like make a draft budget but then maybe make a different slightly different scenario and create another budget and kind of see what that looks like um or you know use it to kind of do a rolling forecast you can do that as well all right that is it I that that's really all I wanted to show you guys is this is how you create a budget in QuickBooks Online um and again I really do like the ability to run a profit and actual report in a system and not have to rely on it doing it manually so save yourself a ton of time you know for the slight increase in the cost of plus over Essentials I mean how much time could you potentially be saving every month not trying to figure out the how to do all the Excel formulas to get your budget to actual pulling correctly so something to think about and again if you need any help with your QuickBook subscription feel free to email us uh hello Clara cfo.com is our support for the people who have purchased QuickBooks Online through us um we can see if you do want to get an upgrade we can try to uh see if that's still available so all right thank you guys for being here I really appreciate it if you have any questions about budgeting and QuickBooks online please put them in the comment section below and I will talk to you later all right bye everybody

Channel: Clara CFO Group

Views: 5,389

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, quickbooks online tutorial, budget in qbo, budget in quickbooks, create a budget, create a budget tutorial, create a budget in QBO tutorial, set up a budget in qbo, how to set up a budget in quickbooks, quickbooks budget, budget vs actual, how to create a budget vs actual, quickbooks expert, quickbooks discount, clara cfo qbo, clara cfo group, quickbooks online training, financial management, small business budget, budget for small business

Id: TeR46-3Aq4s

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023