Time for action – creating a budget for your business

You are going to create a budget for the next three months to serve as a guide for your operations. Typically, investors, banks and other lenders will need financial projections for a longer period. As a minimum they will need one year projections which may go up to 3 to 5 years in many cases.

1. From the menu select Actions | Budget | New Budget. A new budget screen will open.

2. Click on the Options toolbar button. The Budget Options dialog will open. For this tutorial, we are going to select a beginning date of three months back. This is only for the purposes of this tutorial and will allow us to quickly run Budget vs. Actual reports.

3. In the Budget Period pane, change the beginning on date to a date three months ago. Change the Number of Periods to 3. Type in the Budget Name MACS Jun-Aug Budget as shown in the following screenshot and click on OK.

   

4. The budget screen will show a list of accounts with a column for each month. The date shown in...