If you’re like most businesses, you only have limited money to spend. Surprisingly, though, too many companies operate without a plan to control spending and balance it against income.
Budgeting is the best way to not only plan for spending, but also to understand your cash flows and grow your company. QuickBooks Online allows businesses to set up multiple budgets at once, allocating funds by year, quarter, month, project, job, class, and more to achieve full control over spending.
In our upcoming webinar, you can learn the ins and out of creating budgets in QuickBooks Online, as well as alternatives for seamless fund allocation. To get a head start on managing your cash flows, you can follow these simple tips for budgeting in QuickBooks Online.
Make sure to join Alicia Pollock on June 30 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time for the webinar, "Budgeting in QBO." You can register here.
Creating a Budget
Adding a new budget in QuickBooks Online is straightforward. Start by clicking on the gear icon in the top right corner and choose Budgeting. In the menu you’ll see all the budgets you’ve already created, plus an option to Add Budget in green. Click that to create a new budget.
You’ll have to name your budget, and then you have options for designating the time interval for your budget. You can create yearly budgets, or break them down further and plan your spending on quarterly or monthly bases. There’s also the option to create your budget from scratch or base it off last year’s numbers.
Once you’ve created your budget, you can control how you view it in QuickBooks Online. The column timeline can be expanded or collapsed as needed by clicking on the Grid Gear above the chart to the right. You can also toggle back and forth between monthly, quarterly, and annual views, hide rows you don’t need at the moment, and condense the text to see more of your budget on your screen at any given time.
The final step is building out your budget by allocating your expenses and expected income. Every cell of QuickBooks Online functions as its own mini-calculator that can perform simple math for you. Alternatively, some businesses choose to work off past numbers, prefilling data from the prior year into their budget and making adjustments as necessary. You can also easily duplicate values across columns and utilize shortcuts to break annual totals into monthly budgets.
Budgeting By Project or Class
One of the benefits of budgeting in QuickBooks Online is that you’re not limited to just total company spending, but can subdivide your budgets as many times as you want according to customer, project, class, and more.
The Projects Center in QuickBooks Online makes it easy to track income and expenses for individual customer jobs. You have the option of either creating a separate budget for each project, or creating a budget for an individual client and subdividing it for each separate project for that client. Overall budgets can similarly be divided amongst your different customers when you first create them. With these options, you can track the budget for a specific client project from start to finish.
QuickBooks Online also supports budgeting by class. This feature allows you to break down your income and expenses for individual revenue streams and create a budget for each class of financials.
Third-Party Apps for Budgeting
QuickBooks Online isn’t the only option for corporate budgeting. Apps like Divvy allow you to allocate your funds through hassle-free employee credit cards. Divvy allows you to easily establish budgets by project, team, event, or any other category you need in order to best manage your spending.
Divvy helps businesses avoid overspending by providing real-time visibility into expenditures, without having to wait for month-end financial closures. You can also control and edit your budgets on the web or via mobile apps at any time. With Divvy, you can create living budgets that go beyond static spreadsheets.
The key to business success and growth is having control over and visibility into your spending. With the right tools for budgeting, you’ll have confidence that you’re putting your limited funds to proper use.
Make sure to join Alicia Pollock on June 30 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time for the webinar, "Budgeting in QBO." You can register here.