Adding and Maintaining Budgets

The Budget Maintenance form, available from the PJC Transactions folder, lets you forecast revenues and costs over several fiscal periods, so that you can budget your contracts effectively.

You can use the Budget Maintenance form to:

• Enter budgets

  You can enter up to five optional budgets for a project category per fiscal period.

  The ability to enter several budgets per fiscal period enables you to create and compare "what-if" scenarios.

• View actual, recognized, and budgeted amounts

  Project and Job Costing lets you view actual, recognized, and budgeted quantities, costs, and revenues for a specified contract, project, or category.

  If you selected the Update Budgets option on the PJC Options form, Project and Job Costing updates actual costs or revenues on the Budget Maintenance form for most projects when you:

  • Post transactions (including opening balances) in Project and Job Costing.

  • Post job-related transactions in Canadian or US Payroll, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, or Purchase Orders. (Note that actual costs and quantities are not updated when you post interest invoices in Accounts Payable.)

  • Run Day End Processing in Inventory Control.

  For projects that use the accrual-basis accounting method, recognized amounts are updated immediately when you post transactions in Project and Job Costing or job-related transactions in other Sage ERP Accpac programs.

• Compare budget sets by fiscal year and period

  You can compare actual, total, or budgeted quantities, costs, and revenues by fiscal year and period.

Note: Although you can view budgeted figures for a contract or a project, you add budget amounts only at the category level for a project, regardless of the project type or accounting method.

Budgeting Tools

The Budget Maintenance form provides several tools and calculation methods to help you create budgets for a project category.

You can use any combination of the following methods to arrive at the budget amounts:

• Import budgets

  You can import budget figures created in a spreadsheet or database using the File/Import command on the Budget Maintenance form.

• Enter budget amounts manually

  Type the budget amounts in the Budget Quantity, Budget Cost, or Budget Revenue columns for each period.

• Calculate budget amounts

  Enter a base amount and let the system calculate and enter the period amounts. You can use several methods - Fixed, Spread, Base Increase, and Copy - to have the system calculate budget amounts based on information you provide.

• Use the lookup feature

  Use the Budget Set Lookup feature to display actual, recognized, or budget amounts from any contract, project, and category, then use them as the basis for building a budget for another category in the same project or in another project, even in another contract. To transfer the inquiry amounts to the new budget:

  • Use the Add To button to add the inquiry quantity, cost, and revenue amounts to the budget quantity, cost, and revenue amounts.

  • Use the Replace button to replace the budget amounts with the inquiry amounts.

  • Use a Copy budget method to perform an operation on the inquiry quantity, cost and revenue amounts, and then add or copy the new calculated amounts to the budget quantity, cost, and revenue amounts.

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