Budgets

A budget is a monthly plan for one fiscal year: how much you expect each income and expense account to be, month by month. Once one exists, the P&L can show actuals beside plan and the variance between them.

Find it at Admin → Ledger → Budgets.

Budgets cover income and expense accounts only — the things a P&L reports. You don't budget your bank balance.

Create a budget

Go to Admin → Ledger → Budgets.
Type a name — something you'll recognise in a dropdown a year from now, like "2027 Plan" or "2027 Conservative".
Pick the fiscal year. If your fiscal year doesn't start in January, the picker says so and the grid's columns start with your first fiscal month.
Click Create. You land on the grid.

You can keep more than one budget for the same year — an optimistic and a conservative plan, say — and choose which one to compare against when you run the P&L.

Fill in the grid

The grid is accounts down the side, your twelve fiscal months across the top, and a Total column and row.

Type into any cell. Row, column and grand totals update as you type, so you can see the effect of a change immediately.
Press Enter to move down the same month's column — the fastest way to work through one month at a time.
Formats that work: 12500, 12,500, $12,500.00, -500, and (500) for a negative.
An empty cell means not budgeted. A cell you deliberately set to 0 also stores as empty — "no plan" and "planned zero" come to the same thing here.
A cell that isn't a number turns pink and the Save budget button greys out. Nothing is saved until every cell reads as a number, so a typo can't quietly become a zero.

Click Save budget when you're done. If anything goes wrong, nothing is saved — the budget you had before is untouched.

Start from last year instead of from nothing

Fill from last year's actuals replaces the whole grid with what actually happened in the fiscal year before this budget's. That's usually the honest starting point: begin with reality, then adjust the lines you intend to change.

It overwrites everything in the grid, so use it first and edit afterwards, not the other way round.

Compare actuals against the budget

On Admin → Ledger → Reports → P&L:

Set your date range.
Set Compare to… → Budget and pick the budget.
Tick $ Change and/or % Change.
Click Run.

You get an Actual column, a Budget column, and the variance. Every account gets one, and so does GROSS PROFIT and NET INCOME.

The budget follows your date range. Run January through June and the budget column shows the first six months of the plan — the report title confirms it ("6 months"). Run a single month and you get that month's budget. You don't need a separate YTD budget.

Two things the report will tell you rather than guess about:

A range that starts or ends mid-month. A monthly budget can't be honestly split across part of a month, so whole months are used and the report says so.
A range that doesn't overlap the budget's fiscal year at all. You get a note instead of a comparison — otherwise every line would show a 100% shortfall against a budget of zero.

Accounts you budgeted but had no activity in still appear, with the full budget as the variance. That's usually the most interesting row on the report: money you planned to spend and didn't.

Use Export CSV on the P&L to take the whole comparison into a spreadsheet.

What the colours mean

The variance columns are colour-coded, and the colours mean better or worse than plan — not simply higher or lower.

Green — you're ahead of budget. More income than planned, or less spending than planned.
Amber — you're behind budget. Less income than planned, or more spending than planned.

Income and expenses are read in opposite directions, because that's what "doing well" means for each. Earning $10,000 more than planned and spending $10,000 more than planned are not the same news.

A shaded background marks the variances worth your attention, in two strengths — a light tint for notable, a stronger one for significant. Everything else stays plain.

A variance has to clear both a dollar amount and a percentage before it gets shaded:

	dollars	percentage
Light tint	at least $1,000	at least 10%
Strong tint	at least $5,000	at least 15%

Requiring both is deliberate. A percentage on its own would shade every trivial account — a $5 charge against a 50¢ budget is off by 900% and means nothing. A dollar amount on its own would shade every large account, where a 1% wobble is thousands of dollars and equally meaningless. An account only lights up when the gap is both big enough to matter and wide enough to be a real change.

Accounts you never budgeted are shaded on the dollar amount alone, since there's no percentage to work out. An $8,000 expense against no plan at all is exactly the sort of thing this is for.

Colours are for scanning, not for judgement — a large amber variance may be perfectly deliberate. They tell you where to look, not what to conclude.

Who can edit budgets

Anyone with the GL admin permission, unless VMX has restricted your login to specific Ledger screens. If you can see the Budgets page but every cell is read-only, that's the restriction — contact help@vmxllc.com.