Estimate budgets

To achieve a more realistic view of the situation, you can estimate budgets. With these estimates, you use a percentage to indicate the extent to which you expect the budget to be realised. You can view the forecast, calculated using the estimate percentage, on the operational overviews.

Towards the end of a financial year, your colleagues will probably regularly ask you if you can tell them something about the company result. In this case, the budget can no longer provide you with sufficient information.

However, you can provide a forecast based on the information you have available at that moment. For example, if you know that certain orders have or have not been placed, or if they have been moved to the next period or the next financial year. If, for example, there are still three months left in the financial year, you can probably say something meaningful about the various cost and turnover categories. The further the financial year advances, the more precisely you can specify what the various final outcomes will be and whether or not the budget has been achieved.

Example:

For a specific cost entry, up until the end of period 10, a spend of € 210,500 has already been realised.
For all 12 periods, you had budgeted for a total of € 240,000.
You estimate the costs for the last two periods to be € 21,000 and € 21,400 respectively. This is 105% and 107% respectively of the period budgets. You then enter these percentages as the closing estimate percentage. You can translate and enter your estimates per period as a percentage.

Contents

Estimate a budget

With budget estimating, you record more and more accurate estimates and otherwise you do not change the budget figures. For each ledger account you want to record an estimate for, you enter an estimated percentage for each period (of the actual financial year). Profit uses the period budget to calculate the operations amount.

To estimate budgets:

Go to: Financial / Ledger / Budget.
Sort by financial year or filter on the desired financial year.
Open the properties of the budget line.
Go to the tab: Period budget.
Open the properties of the relevant period budget line that you a closing estimate for.
Go to the tab: General.
Enter the closing estimate percentage in the Estimate sum field. This percentage is multiplied by the original period budget. You immediately see the closing estimate amount.
Click on: OK.

If you use allocations within budgets, you can find the closing estimate percentage on the Allocation tab under the allocation in question.

To view the closing budget estimation:

You can view the closing estimate percentages and amounts in the budgets view and via the annual budget properties.

To view the budget closing estimate:

Go to: Financial / Ledger / Budget.
Open the properties of the budget line.
Go to the tab: Period budget.
On this tab, Profit displays the amounts and quantities for the selected period including the closing estimate percentage and amount.