Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's special episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring how to import subdivided budgets into QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Online Advanced with ProAdvisor and trainer Carla Caldwell. Carla will walk you through how to import a subdivided budget and run a report. Hey, ProAdvisors, I'm Jaclyn, and you're watching In the Know. It's the show designed to keep you in the know on the most exciting updates to QuickBooks Online. So without further ado, let me go ahead and welcome Carla.
Carla Caldwell: It is great to be here Jaclyn to talk budgets, and how we can subdivide and import them in. If that doesn't get you excited today, what can?
Jaclyn Anku: I don't know. I am very excited to see this in action. So Carla, let me turn it over to you for a demo on how to import subdivided budgets.
Carla Caldwell: Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. I've already popped into the budgets area of QuickBooks Online. So as I get going, you're going to see that that is where I'm landing. But just in case you're not sure how I got there, I went to the gear icon, went to budgeting, and that's where we are here.
So first and foremost, what is a subdivided budget? Well, a budget is obviously setting a goal for the money of an organization. So it allows us to put in what we expect or have as goals for the money, revenue, and expenses in an organization. When we “subdivide” them, it means we're splitting it up. We're dividing them using one of three areas we have access to in QuickBooks Online. We can do locations, classes, and customers. These are incredibly powerful categories of being able to look at the data and the information in different ways, and the more complex or sophisticated the client is, the more they need this information. Combining that complexity and that analysis that they're looking for with this budgeting capability is really important. We could do some subdivided budgets before, but we couldn't import them in, so it was a little bit cumbersome. Now what we're able to do is import those in.
Now if you're like me, I don't want to start from a blank page. I want to be able to import my budget, but I also want to know what format it needs to be in. So you're going to see how to walk all through that. When we go to import a budget, even if you don't have the template yet, this is where you're going to go to get it. So I selected import budget. When I do that, you're going to see that we have the ability here to import in a profit and loss budget type. We would select the period that we want this to be imported in. Notice we can import in future periods; that is really helpful, especially in the fall and you're starting to get ready for budgets for next year, or even if you have a client that does multi-year budgeting.
A consolidated budget would simply be just one big budget covering all areas. But what we want to look at is the subdivided budget. And of course, there are some little help buttons here that allow you to see this, so we can go in and then select which of the three areas. Now, in this sample company that we're in, it's the Candela sample company. For my company, we have a territory, which is our location. We just used one of the names that they allow us to use in QuickBooks Online to rename the location. And then, of course, we have classes and we have customers. Once we have selected one of these, in our case, we're going to select class today. We can say that we want to subdivide it for specific ones. I could choose to subdivide based on just a few of these classes, or I could say I want to do it for all. I'm going to go ahead and select all, and then I'm going to go ahead and click Next.
Now if you've already got your budget into a template, you can skip this and just upload it. But I'm not going to select Skip, because this is where I get my template. So I'm going to go ahead and download my template. You can see I've done it a few times because it numbered it number three for me, and so I'm going to go ahead and open up that budget.
Now I already have one set up and had downloaded it, and I actually only selected to use the budget for sales and accounting. Okay, so this is my spreadsheet that we are going to be importing in. This is the template, if you will. You'll notice that there's going to be a tab in the template giving you some guidelines of what you should and should not do with this spreadsheet. That’s really important that you take note of that to be able to get rid of any tabs along the bottom that you're not going to use.
When I first did this and exported this out, I exported every class out of it into this template, but then I decided I only wanted to create budgets for two of them, so I just got rid of the others. But you have to be careful about changing the sheet names or the table, columns, and things like that. So you just have to be careful. Read the directions here. You guys are good with all that stuff.
So in the accounting class, you can see that it exports out the whole chart of accounts for the year. And I just enter in where I want to put in that budget. And this is what I did, just threw in some numbers here, went to the sales tab, and did the same type of thing. You'll notice that I even have formulas in here, and that's not a problem. You don't have to change that over to actual numbers. Leave those formulas in there. You are just fine. Once you have this, of course, save it, and then we can import that back in.
So now let's pop over to QuickBooks Online and pick up where we left off. Okay, so we have exported out our template. We have completed it within the guidelines that it gives us on that first sheet, and now we're ready to select that budget and upload it. I selected the budget, I selected Next, and QuickBooks does its magic, importing that budget right in. It doesn't take very long at all, and as soon as it's done, I can select the option to view the budget. When I do, here it is.
So let's take it from the top and understand what we're looking at here. First of all, QuickBooks gave it a name for me that isn't the most elegant of names. I may want to change that myself. That's why there's a little pencil there, and I can change that to whatever it is I would like to. In my case, I'm going to call this sales accounting, and that is going to be the name of my very creatively titled budget, and that's what we're going to have. It reminds me of what period I have imported that in for, if I want to be able to compare and look at any reference data I could.
I can also see that this is what the reference data is that we'll be looking at. If I did that, I can see that it is subdivided for multiple subdivisions, if you will, multiple areas. And I'm currently looking at the one just for sales. If I change that and go to accounting, I can see the ones for accounting, and I just simply need to scroll down a little bit and it will show me all of those budget numbers in here. It's a little further down, and it's always fun to do this live, because it takes longer than you ever thought it would. But now you can see those numbers are right there. So it put in those monthly numbers. Again, I didn't have to switch it from a formula to an actual number. Everything worked out just beautifully. And of course, now that it's here, you can edit this even further if you need to.
So I'm going to go ahead and save that budget, and now I'm going to be able to go run a report. And of course, QuickBooks wants to know how easy it was. Of course, it was super easy. You can give that feedback right away. We're going to skip that for just a moment. Okay, so I have done my budget, and now I can run a budget versus actuals’ report. It’s just right here and super easy to access, so go ahead and take a look at this report.
Now we're looking at the budget versus actual report. What you're going to see is that we have our budget here on this report, and if I scroll on down, you can see I have expenses with no budget. But if I keep on scrolling, it's going to take me just a second to get toward where we put in that budget. You can see that we have our annual budget showing because we ran this report for the year; I can see my annual budget for the accounting division or class that we created and imported that budget for. And of course, if I go over to the sales area, I put that information into the income and the cost of goods sold. And we can see all of that here as well.
So that imported budget is now here on the reports, allowing us to have really great conversations with our clients, helping them understand how they are earning and spending their dollars toward the goals that they have set in their budget.
Jaclyn Anku: Well, Carla, thank you so much for this fantastic demo of importing subdivided budgets, and how to run reports on those. I agree. I think that'll be a huge help for ProAdvisors and their clients. So thank you.
Carla Caldwell: Thank you
Jaclyn Anku: And thank you for watching this episode. I'm Jaclyn, the host of In the Know and leader of ProAdvisor training and certification. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. We'll catch you next time!
Meet the ProAdvisors
ProAdvisor Carla Caldwell: Founder, Caldwell Consulting
