# Budgets

> Plan revenue and expenses for a fiscal year by month or week, start from last year's figures, and compare the plan with what actually happened.

Canonical: https://docs.getonebooks.com/accounting/budgets/
Language: en
Documentation index: https://docs.getonebooks.com/llms.txt

A **budget** is your plan for one fiscal year: the revenue you expect on each revenue account and what you mean to spend on each expense account, period by period. Open **Budgets** in the sidebar to create one, then follow the year against it.

A budget is a plan, not a transaction. Creating, editing or deleting one never posts anything: the ledger, every report and your tax figures are the same with or without it. The actual figures it is compared with come straight from the ledger.

You can keep several budgets for the same year — a base plan, a stretch plan and a lean one — and mark one as the **Primary budget**: the one the dashboard, the expense hints and the assistant follow. A new budget is a **Draft** until you **Activate** it; only an **Active** budget is tracked against your actuals, and only an active budget can be primary. **Archive** a budget you no longer follow: it becomes read-only until you activate it again. An active budget must be archived before it can be deleted. Everyone on the team, viewers included, can see budgets; creating and changing them needs the `budgets.manage` permission, which owners and admins hold by default (see [Users, roles and permissions](https://docs.getonebooks.com/settings/users-roles/)).

## Creating a budget

1. On **Budgets**, select **New budget**.
2. **Details** — enter a name, choose the **Fiscal year** (this one or the next), **Plan by** month or week, and for a weekly budget the day **Weeks start on**.
3. **Starting point** — choose how the amounts are filled in:
   - **From last year** repeats last year's pattern period by period. Set **Revenue growth (%)** and **Expense growth (%)**, or switch on **Use a flat average instead** to give every period last year's average.
   - **From a revenue target** spreads the **Revenue target for the year** in the shape of last year's sales; each expense keeps its share of revenue, or stays where it was with **Keep expenses at last year's level**.
   - **Copy another budget** starts from a budget you already have, adjusted by a percentage.
   - **Blank** starts with an empty grid; **Import a spreadsheet** creates an empty budget and opens the CSV import.
   - **Draft it with the assistant** lets you describe the plan in your own words (see the assistant section below).
4. **Preview** — check the revenue and expense totals. Accounts with no activity last year start at zero. Switch on **Start tracking it now** to activate the budget at once, and **Make it the primary budget** if it is the plan to follow.
5. Select **Create budget**.

The budget opens on its **Plan** tab: your revenue accounts, then your expense accounts, their totals and a **Net profit** row, with one column per period and a **Total**. Type in a cell or paste a block copied from a spreadsheet; changes save automatically. The row tools — **Spread a total evenly**, **Copy the first period across**, **Grow by a percentage**, **Grow by a fixed amount**, **Copy last year** and **Clear the row** — fill a whole row in one step, and **Compare with last year** shows last year's actual under every cell. **Export CSV** and **Import** round-trip the grid through a spreadsheet: the template lists every active revenue and expense account with the budget's periods as columns, and a file with any problem row imports nothing. To revise a plan and keep the original, **Duplicate** it first from the Budgets list.

## Monthly or weekly

- **Monthly** — twelve periods, one per month of your fiscal year.
- **Weekly** — one period per week, starting on the weekday you choose (businesses in Saudi Arabia usually start the week on Sunday). The first and last weeks are cut at the start and end of the fiscal year, so they can be shorter than seven days, and a year has 52 to 54 weekly periods. A weekly plan suits restaurants and shops that review sales and costs every week.

You choose when you create the budget; to plan the same year the other way, create a second budget. Periods follow the fiscal year start in your business settings, so a budget for an April–March year runs from April to March.

## Budget vs actual

The **Performance** tab of a budget, and **Budget vs actual** under Reports, set the plan beside your actual figures:

- **Actual** is computed live from the ledger with the profit and loss rules — year-end closing and opening-balance entries are left out — so net profit matches the [profit and loss](https://docs.getonebooks.com/reports/profit-loss/) for the same dates. Revenue and expenses match too, except **4300 Discount Received**: the profit and loss shows it as a reduction of expenses, while a budget keeps it with revenue, where its account type puts it.
- **Variance** is actual minus budget. Its status reads **Favourable** when revenue is above plan or an expense is below plan, and **Unfavourable** the other way round.
- **To date** covers the periods that have started by the date you choose. For the period in progress, the budget is paced: what it allows so far is the period's budget times the share of its days that have passed.
- **Projected year end** is the actual to date plus the budget for the remaining periods; beside it, **At the current rate** stretches the actual to date over the whole year.
- A note on any cell records why it moved — "campaign brought forward from May" — so the explanation stays with the figure for the next review.

Read the comparison by period, by quarter or for the whole year, and export it to CSV, Excel or PDF. When the year turns out differently from the plan, **Reforecast** re-plans the remaining periods from your results so far: once two periods have closed, each account's remaining periods are scaled by how its actuals compare with its budget (between half and one and a half times), closed periods keep their budget, and you see the changes before you apply them.

## Insights and alerts

**Insights** list the findings worth a look, most serious first: an expense over its budget, an expense near its limit this period or spending faster than the period allows, revenue behind or ahead of plan, net profit at risk for the year, a variance that has grown three periods in a row, activity on an account with no budget, and a plan so far from the actuals that it is time to reforecast. They are worked out by fixed rules from the figures, so every screen and the assistant see the same list.

**Alert thresholds** on the Plan tab decide when a line is flagged:

| Threshold | Default |
|---|---|
| Warn when an expense reaches (% of its budget) | 80 |
| Flag revenue that is behind plan by (%) — twice this is critical | 10 |
| Ignore differences smaller than (% of budget) | 10 |
| Ignore differences smaller than (amount) | 0.5 % of the year's budgeted expenses |

A difference counts only when it reaches both the percentage and the amount.

While the primary budget is active and covers today, the dashboard shows this period's revenue, expenses and net profit against the plan, and **Record Expense** and the **Account Details** tab of a purchase show how much of this period's budget is left for the account you picked — amber once it reaches the warning threshold, red once it is over. These are advice only: OneBooks never blocks a transaction because of a budget.

## With the assistant

The [AI assistant](https://docs.getonebooks.com/ai/overview/) and connected agents read budgets and draft them. Try:

- "How are we tracking against budget this month?"
- "Which expenses are over budget?"
- "Draft next year's budget from this year's sales with 10% growth."

The assistant reads the same variance and insights as the Performance tab and explains them in words; the figures come from OneBooks, not from the model. To create a budget or change its amounts it prepares a [proposal](https://docs.getonebooks.com/ai/drafting/) showing the totals for revenue and expenses, or each change with its current and new value, and nothing is saved until you select **Confirm**. By default only an owner or admin can propose budgets. Activating or archiving an existing budget, deleting one, reforecasting and importing stay in the app.

## Related

  - [Profit and loss](https://docs.getonebooks.com/reports/profit-loss/)
  - [Fiscal years, locking and closing](https://docs.getonebooks.com/accounting/fiscal-years/)
  - [Draft documents with proposals](https://docs.getonebooks.com/ai/drafting/)