Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

[Dale Alspach]

I use QuickBooks Pro (QBP) as treasurer for a non-profit. The basic
budgeting is straightforward monthly budgets for the next year.
(I have not tried messing with other periods than a year to see
if it is possible.) QBP produces a popup window show 12 months
and a dropdown list of accounts. Budgets are per account.
You choose an account and either enter the budget amount for
each month or use some automation to fill the budget. You can
enter an amount in the first month and then automatically fill
the remainder with the amount from the first month
possibly adjusted by a percentage. 

As far as I can tell the only way to budget for a collection of
accounts is to put an account into the hierarchy that contains
the others as subaccounts and budget the higher level account.

There is another budgeting feature which I have only played
with and have not really used. This is for projects or jobs.
You can create job templates with breakdowns into various
items. When you start a job of a certain type
you use the template to create a
budget for that job. This seems most appropriate when a
business has a small number of different jobs that are done
repeatedly for the customers.

Dale Alspach