Budgets

A budget is your plan for income and expenses over a financial year, per project, by month, quarter or year. Zhmara X compares it with what actually happened and can warn you before an expense goes over budget. A budget never posts anything to your accounts.

Go to Budget › Budgets. The Budget section must be in your plan; budgets use the Budget permission.

Creating a budget

1. Click Add Budget.
2. Enter the Budget Name, and choose the Financial Year, the Project and the Period Type: Monthly (12 columns), Quarterly (4) or Yearly (1).
3. Add accounts: Add Account, or Add all income accounts / Add all expense accounts. Only income and expense accounts can be budgeted.
4. Enter an amount for each account and period. Amounts can't be negative. Spread yearly amount divides a yearly figure evenly over the periods.
5. Save as Draft, or Save and Approve.

Amounts are in the base currency.

Filling from history

Fill from fills the lines for you, from:

• Actuals of a financial year: what the selected project actually earned and spent in that year, or
• Another budget.

Adjust with Change % (for example +10%), click Fill, then review and save. Existing lines are replaced.

Statuses

To change an approved budget, use Set to Draft, edit and approve it again. An approved budget can't be deleted; set it to draft first.

Budget vs Actual

Open a budget to see Budget vs Actual: for each account, the budget, the actual amount, the Variance and the percentage used, with a Budget vs Actual by Period chart. Choose Whole Year, Year to Date or a range of periods.

Variance is positive when income is above budget or expenses are below budget. Actuals come from the posted transactions of the budget's project.

The Accounting Dashboard shows Budget Usage for the current year's approved budgets.

Overspend warning

Turn on Budget Warning in Preferences. Then, when you save an expense, outcome voucher, purchase bill or journal that takes an expense account over its approved budget for that period, you see:

This voucher takes these expense accounts over their approved budget: ...

Each line is checked against the budget of its own project, so a journal or expense split between projects can show more than one budget; each row then names its budget.

Choose Save anyway or Cancel. It's a warning, not a block, and drafts are not checked.