How to Do a Budget in Quickbooks Online

Elise Williams

2023-09-08 16:30:03 • Filed to: Quickbooks Solution • Proven solutions

The QuickBooks online budget enables you to prepare, monitor, track and even compare your expected income and expenditure with actual income and expenditure. Keeping an online budget helps you prepare for a fiscal year, and this makes your job easier. The QuickBooks online budgeting tool has many uses, and they are outlined below.

How to Check Your Fiscal Year Settings

First, you need to check your budgetary year setting on your QuickBooks before you start preparing your budget. Below is how to do that.

Press the gear icon that’s beside your company name
Select "company setting" from the setting column that appears from the drop-down list.
Then select advanced at the left-hand side of the dialog box.
Confirm whether the first month of the fiscal year is correct from the accounting section and make the necessary corrections if it is not.
Select ok.

How to Create an Online Budget in QuickBooks

Since you have double check that your fiscal year is set correctly, now you can continue setting up a budget in Quickbooks online.

Select the gear icon and then click on the budgeting link.
A page to create a new budget will appear with an "add budget" button which you will click on.
On the window that will appear, name your budget by inputting the information into the correct field.
Click on the fiscal year and choose the desired fiscal year for your budget from the drop down.
Click on interval and choose the time interval to display within your budget.
If you want to pre-fill your budget with actual data, click on the "pre-fill data"
Click on sub-divide to sub-divide your budget and choose the customers, locations and classes you want to subdivide the budget into.
You can also choose to add a "view budget for" to show all the choices in your budget.
Click on "next" to continue creating a budget in Quickbooks online.

How to Edit Online Budget Information

Click on the line in the budget you wish to edit.
Then enter the necessary information into the selected line.
To enter the same information across the entire column, click on the "copy across" link.
Also, to clear all the fields, select the clear button.
Select save and close.

You can also do the following under the action button.

Under the action column, click the edit button.

Also, delete any unwanted budget by clicking on delete under the action column.

You can also copy a budget by clicking copy under the action button.

Under the run budget overview, you can run your budget vs. actual.

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