Corporate Budgeting Options

Use the General Ledger Budgeting tool to enter and track corporate budget data. Use corporate budgets to monitor the revenue and expense accounts in your general ledger.

You enter corporate budgets on a firm-wide basis and, if you are using the Organization Reporting application, you associate each budget with a specific organization or profit center. Develop budgets at the beginning of each fiscal year for all of your Income Statement accounts. You can review and revise your budgets as needed during the year.

Use the General Ledger Budgeting worksheet to complete 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.
• Distribute an annual 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, Vision places $1,000 in each period. This allows you to automatically distribute annual amounts evenly to those accounts having no variations by period.
• Distribute an annual amount on a period-by-period basis. For example, your firm may experience higher vacation expenses during the summer months. Therefore, you may choose to apportion your vacation expense budget account 712.00 Vacation on a period basis, allocating a greater portion of the annual expense to each of the summer months. This allows you to more evenly match revenue and expense figures with your budgets, for those accounts for which you anticipate significant variations by period.
• Compound the annual budget. This feature allows you to distribute an annual amount incrementally (by percent 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, Vision calculates a base amount of $561 for the first period. The second period amount of $617 is calculated by increasing the amount in the first period by 10% (561 + 56 = 617). Thus, each successive period amount is increased based on the amount in the preceding period. This allows you to more accurately budget accounts, such as depreciation accounts, that accrue at regular intervals each period.
• Adjust the annual budget. This feature allows you to adjust the period amounts by a set amount or percent for each period. For example, you may experience an increase in rental income halfway through the year. You can then select periods 6 through 12 for account 810.00 Rent Income and enter $100 as your adjustment amount. The amounts in each of the periods 6 thrum 12 increases by $100. This allows you to adjust your budget to reflect changes in your income and expenses as they occur throughout the year.
• Consolidate multiple budgets. This feature allows you to 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.