Create budgets

Summary

Information about budgets and how to set them up in Sage 50 Accounts.

Description

You can use budgets to monitor costs and income, to assess the profitability of your business. You can check these figures on an annual basis or month by month basis. 

Resolution

Decide how you want to track the budget

Use our Standard and Advanced budgeting methods article to choose your budgeting method.

Set your budget method

Set up either the Standard or Advanced budgeting method in your software.

Create department records

Before you can enter your budget values, you must create department records.  

Create budget records

You can only create Budget records when using the Department Overview or Department In-Depth budgeting methods.

You can create as many Budget records as required against each department. This allows analysis against more that one nominal category or nominal code for each department reference.

  1. Click Departments, select the department to add a budget to, then click Budgets.
  2. From the Nominal Area, select the nominal category or code you want to enter a budget value for. For example, Product Sales or nominal code 4000.

 NOTE: Nominal categories are only available when you use the Department Overview budgeting method.   

The fields populate as follows:

Year
 The current year appears in the Year box. You can select up to five previous years. However, you can't enter data for previous years, these years populate when you run the year end process. When you enter forecast values for the current year, the software populates the forecast for the previous year. It uses the budget figures from the current year.
Nominal
 Department In-Depth budgeting method, the nominal code you select populates this box. Department Overview, this box remains blank.
Chart of Accounts
 The chart of accounts you select as default appears here, you can choose another chart of accounts from the drop-down list.
Name
 The name of the nominal code you select appears here. When using the Department Overview budgeting method, this box remains blank.
Notes
 If required, enter any additional reference notes.
  1. Complete the remaining fields as follows:
Total Budget
 If you want to spread an annual budget evenly over 12 months, enter the annual budget here.
Total Actual and Total Variance
 These boxes update as you post transactions to that department.
Monthly Breakdown table
 You can enter individual monthly values for Budget and Forecast, the forecast values are the budget values for the following year.
  1. Click Copy Values at the top of the window. This copies the first months value to the other months in the year. You can use the same value every month or add an increment.

  2. Click Save then click Close.

To continue to enter further budget information for the department, repeat the above steps.

Further information

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Solution Properties

Solution ID
200427112205417
Last Modified Date
Wed Jun 18 15:25:50 UTC 2025
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