Creating a budget is an important function in maintaining the finances of your church. Church360°® Ledger makes this easy by allowing you to copy and paste a budget from Excel, use previous fiscal years’ budgets or actuals, or even manually enter a total for each month. The budget feature can be found under the settings icon.
Note: In the budget view, you can change which year’s budget you are looking at by clicking the drop-down in the upper right under the search bar.
The budget view is a large chart with several automated features to make building a budget easier. Income and expense accounts show as they appear in the Chart of Accounts with all accounts, categories, and restricted funds.
The dark gray rows are the totals for the given account and cannot be edited. The far left column lists the names of the accounts. The next column lists the total for the year for each account.
For a quick budget, you can enter the yearly total in the “Total” column to divide that amount evenly across all months. For a more detailed budget, you can enter the total for each month individually. Clicking on a cell will enlarge the cell and display the previous year’s budget and actuals for reference; clicking on the budgeted or actual number will fill the cell with the number you clicked on.
Note: You can use tab, enter, or the arrow keys to navigate the grid as you can in Excel.
Here is how to create a budget:
- Click the settings icon in the upper right corner.
- Select “Budgets”.
- To use last year’s budget or actuals, use the drop-down on the left side above the budget grid. To enter amounts manually, select a white cell in the “Total” column and enter the year’s total budget, or enter the amount for each month manually.
- Click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the view to save your work, or click “Reset” to reset the view to the previous saved version.