Budgeting & Forecasting

1. BUILDING A BUDGET — STEP BY STEP

1. Open (or auto-create) a plan for a fiscal year, location, and scenario — e.g. "FY2026, Main Warehouse, Base Case." A brand-new plan starts in Draft status.
2. Fill in a grid of amounts across every month of your fiscal calendar, for whichever accounts/categories you're budgeting.
3. Submit for approval — this records who submitted it and when. If the same person holds both preparer and approver permissions (common in a small business), this hand-off step can be skipped entirely — the workflow doesn't force ceremony where it isn't needed.
4. Recall — if an approver hasn't acted yet, the preparer can pull a submitted plan back to draft to keep refining it.
5. Approve — an approver locks the plan in, recording who approved it and when. Once approved, line amounts can't be changed until someone explicitly unapproves it first — so an approved budget can't drift without a deliberate, logged decision to reopen it.
6. Unapprove — reverts an approved plan back to draft for further revision if plans change.

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Draft
  Draft --> Submitted: Submit
  Submitted --> Draft: Recall
  Submitted --> Approved: Approve
  Approved --> Draft: Unapprove

Every one of these status changes — submitted, recalled, approved, unapproved — is permanently logged, so you always know exactly who signed off on your budget and when.

2. BUDGET VS. ACTUAL — ALWAYS CURRENT, NEVER STALE

Once a budget exists, you can view it side-by-side against your actual performance — pulled directly and live from your posted General Ledger, not a snapshot someone exported last month. That means your budget-vs-actual variance is always measured against real numbers as of right now, so you catch a variance the same week it happens instead of waiting until quarter-end.

3. HOW IT CONNECTS TO THE REST OF THE SYSTEM

• Chart of Accounts / General Ledger — actuals compared against your budget come directly from the same ledger that produces your financial statements, so there's never a "which number is right" discrepancy between your budget report and your books.
• Financial Statements — budget scenarios give context to your P&L and Balance Sheet reviews, letting you see planned vs. actual in the same conversation.
• CoA Budgeting — a related, account-level budgeting view for finer-grained planning against your chart of accounts directly.

4. WHY IT SCALES FROM SMB TO ENTERPRISE

Quick Reference

  Budgeting & Forecasting .................. Accounting > Budgeting
  CoA Budgeting ............................ Accounting > CoA Budgeting