Using the budgeting function of Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree) is efficient and hassle-free.
The functionality is found under the Maintain menu, right below Chart of Accounts. You’ll open that window, and give your budget a name.
The quickest way to start is to use the ‘Autofill’ option in the top menu bar, which populates your current budget with some other data set. Options include using transaction data from Sage 50 (such as current year actual or actual of a prior year), or using budget data (from the current budget in process or some other budget). Using last year actual transaction data for instance, it fills in only those accounts with activity the prior year, with amounts equaling those prior year transaction, in the months that those transactions took place. Then you can modify those amounts.
The default user interface while you are in the budget is to present you with ‘quick action’ buttons – copy, save and adjust. The copy copies the amount in the cell you are in (or a group of cells you select), paste lets you paste that/those amount(s) in any other cells you choose. Adjust lets you modify the current cell contents in one of two ways: you can modify it by an amount you specify, or you can round that amount to the nearest dollar, or hundred dollars, or thousand dollars.
The other main expeditious way to start the budget process is to import the numbers from an existing spreadsheet. More on that in a later post.
Once you have a budget in place, you can use the provided income statements with budget data, modifying them (see earlier post) as needed. When you have multiple budgets in use, the initial window after you select a financial report gives you an opportunity to select which report to incorporate in to that report.
You can have multiple budgets for a given year, for instance an overall organizational budget as well as particular subset budgets, such as for particular projects or particular grants.
Ideally the organizational budget exactly matches the sum of all the subset budgets of course, but that is quite ambitious and labor-intensive. Especially since often the grant budgets (for instance) are for different periods than the fiscal year, and are very dependent on reality adhering to plan. When reality differs from the original plan, the grant budgets need to be modified as far as timing of amounts and amounts per category – at least internally in order to manage remaining spending (per category, or as a whole) to the budget. When the deviations from plan are significant (such as due to Covid, or a governmental shutdown), then the budget may need to be officially modified with the grant funds provider – perhaps extending the time period of the grant out farther, or reducing amounts allocated to travel and increasing other amounts.
Those project budget activities are necessary, often even to manage ‘small’ amounts. However the overall organizational budget is often not so fine-grained. A specific revenue line in the overall budget may consist of multiple grants, and changes in each of them may cancel out each other. Expense lines in the organizational budget may consist of amounts funded by grants as well as amounts funded by donations.
However when a finance person is talking to a program person about differences from budget, it is crucial that they both understand what budget they are talking about. The grant budgets need to be first priority and very actively managed. If a finance person is speaking about differences from the organizational budget, and the program person thinks they are talking about the project budget, consequences can be non-optimal.
More on budget functionalities in future posts!
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