Your income statement tells how well you’ve done so far this year. Your budget describes what you wanted to do this year. Why not combine them to make a forecast of where you will be at year end?
Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree) Premium and Quantum allow you to maintain multiple budgets. That makes it easy for you to combine actual data with budget data to project where you will be at year end.
There are basically two steps to the process:
- Create a modified budget that incorporates actual amounts for prior months
- Modify an income statement to use your new budget.
To create the budget, go to the Maintain menu and choose Budgets. Click the New button.
In the window that appears enter a name for this budget, such as Forecast. You can also enter a description if you want. At “How would you like to create this budget” choose “Copy amounts from another Sage 50 budget.” (This example assumes you have already created a budget). Click Next.
In the Copy an Existing Sage 50 Budget window, choose the budget you want to use from the “Which existing budget would you like to copy” drop down list. At “Select the periods to copy” choose This Year. And make sure that at “Select the periods to paste into” your starting period matches the starting period in the line above it. Click Finish to return to the Maintain Budgets window.
Now we need to replace the budget numbers with actual numbers for the closed months. Click the Autofill button at the top of the window. Select the option to use actual amounts from Sage 50 and click Next.
At “Select the actual amounts to use” choose “This Year”, then select the first period of your fiscal year at “From” and the last completed month at “To”. For example, if your current period is May, you would copy actuals for January through April. At “Select the budget periods to fill in” enter the same starting period as you used on the line above. The ending period will update automatically. Click Finish to return to the Maintain Budgets window and then click Save.
Now we are ready to modify the income statement. Go to the Reports & Forms menu and choose Financial Statements. Select “<Standard> Income – 12 Period” and click the Design button. In the Design window, right click on the gray Column Desc button and choose Properties.
Now select Column 2. In the lower right section change Qualifier from Net to Budget 1. Repeat that process for all 12 activity columns.
After you have changed all 12 columns (columns 2 – 13), check the Print box for column 14, set the contents to “Year to Date”, enter Total for the title. Set “Align Title” to “Center of Column”. And change the Qualifier to Budget 1. Click OK to save the changes.
Back in the design window, right click on the second Text-Header and choose Properties. Change the text from Income Statement – 12 Periods, to Annual Forecast, or whatever you want to call your report. Click OK.
Now click the Preview button to take a look at the new report. When the Options window appears, select your new Forecast budget as the budget for this report and click OK.
Click the Save button. In the Save As window enter the same name as you used for the report header. You can also enter a description if you want to.
One very important note about this report is that, since this is an annual forecast, you must run it for the last period of your year for it to work properly. So both the From and To time frame settings should be set to period 12 If you are in the first of your two open years, or period 24 if you are in the second of your two open years.
All of the setup is now complete. At the end of each month just use the Autofill feature in Maintain Budgets to update your Forecast budget with the actual amounts for that month before running the Annual Forecast statement.
