Top 5 things you need to know about Budgeting

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Budgeting webinar introduction

0:01
OK, thank you for attending, everybody, just a few housekeeping rules to start off with, so, and all attendees will be on mute and will remain for the whole webinar. Please use the question box to ask any questions related to the topic, and all questions will be answered after the demo. If we run out of time, or if the question requires a longer answer, then it will be answered offline directly afterwards. Please use the chat box for any questions related to the webinar, so, for example, if you can’t hear the audio or if the presenter is going too fast. And please note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent out to all the attendees after the demo.
0:45
OK, so this is the 13th in a series of monthly webinars of key areas of NAV and Business Central to focus on. And you can sign up for as many as you like. And I’ll show you a list of the upcoming webinars at the end of this session. We’ll also send out regular e-mails to register as well.
1:03
My name is Karen, I’ll be facilitating the demo today. I’m an account manager here at TVision My background is 18 years or so for account management experience, working for ERP companies. Ian is going to be doing the demo, and he’s a support consultant here at TVision. He’s been working here for about 2.5 years and has been using NAV since 2000.
1:23
So, my question to you, first of all, is, do you do your budget’s outside of NAV? If so, how long does it take me to prepare them?
1:31
The answer is too long. Then perhaps it’s because of one or more of these common issues, which is multiple copies or format to the budgets,
Maybe there’s an isolation of the departments, and say they’re preparing their own versions. And there’s a lack of version control. So, you don’t know which one is last year’s versus this year’s. Or which version of the current year it is. It’s also open to human error. So, if you’re doing anything typically in Excel, then that’s going to be open to typing errors or maybe formula errors. And then somebody has to consolidate those budgets. So, we’ve got different paths are doing the budgets and somebody needs to put it into one to understand a whole overall business view.
2:15
OK, so if you use your NAV for budgets then you can do them at department level. And you can do them at all cost centre level, enabling each partner to do their own and be consolidated. But, also, really, this webinar is about the fact that a lot of people don’t know that you can do the budget enough. And, therefore, there might not be a whole one version of the truth. So, by doing it within NAB, you’re doing it within one system. And, therefore, it’s all in the same format and everybody can have access to the same information as well. And therefore, it can also be at a consolidated level too.

3:04
OK, so there are budgets for both sales and expenses, Ian is going to show you just expenses, because that’s relevant to most customers, and in the demo, we’ll show you the following areas. What budgets look like, how to drill down on the detail using dimensions, how to import budgets using the copy budget, and export import Excel methods, how to amend or add in the information, and also how to compare budget versus actual using account schedules.
3:35
So, before the demo, I would just like to do a quick poll to see how, where you’re currently doing your budget, so, if you wouldn’t mind just putting the answers in, and then I’ll let you know the results.
4:09
I’m just going to wait just a couple more seconds, while people are putting in their answers.
4:24
OK, so that’s interesting. So, the majority of people, 64%, they said that they currently do their budgets outside of NAV due to the complexity, so hopefully, some of the areas that Ian is going to show you, even if you do have complex budget, can be achieved within.
4:42
OK, so I’ll now hand over to Ian.

Budgeting webinar- main body of the webinar
4:49
So, you want to prepare your financial budget for the following year. And, as Karen mentioned, that’s usually a nightmare of Excel spreadsheets, being e-mailed backwards and forwards. People putting in formulas that don’t work, and then somebody in the finance department has to put this all together, and then you’ve got an Excel spreadsheet with your budget on, which is fantastic. But then you’re recording what’s actually happening in your business, inside NAV. So, at the end of every month, you want to compare against budget. Again, it’s this big issue of getting information out of NAV, putting in formulas to compare your actuals versus your budget. And it’s really an administrative drain, and it takes a lot of time. So, I want to show you how it works if you do it within NAV and hopefully show you how quick and easy it can be. So, for the purposes of this demo, I’m just using a standard Chronos database on a NAV 2018 installation. And if you’re using a different version of NAV, it will look slightly different but the concepts remain exactly the same.
5:53
So, if we go and have a look for our budgets. We’ll look at the GL budgets, and as we can see, there’s already a 2018 Budget on this system. If I want to see what’s in the budget, I can simply double click. This opens up the budget. I’m looking at the 2018 budget. I’ve got my GL accounts down the side, my periods across the top, and I’m viewing it by month. I can, if I want, view this daily level. It’s very unlikely that you prepare a budget at daily level, but you can, if you weekly accounting, you can do it weekly, monthly, quarterly, just for the year, or you can use your accounting periods, whatever suits you.
6:42
And you can choose to show your numbers rounded off or not, to the nearest whole number, the nearest thousand, depending how big your businesses.
6:54
If I just look at this budget. It’s boring, empty budget, and we’re not interested in the budget that’s already there. Let’s start talking about Creating a New Budget for the 2019 year. To create a new Budget, it’s a really simple process. We just click on the new button. All we have to do is give our budget a name and a description. And then I can choose, Do I want to go down into the detail by department by project? I can add more detail, or for one by adding other dimensions, such as Area, customer, purchaser, or Sales Campaign. Or I can miss them out. And maybe I only want to budget at department level.
7:41
So, I could choose if I wanted to, not to use all of these dimensions. But we’ve got our new budget.
7:52
We finished with 2018, so I’m going to block it, so now we’ll make any changes to that, and everybody can see that this is the live one.
8:00
And I’ll double click on that. And, we’ll have a look at our budget, which is boring. It’s empty, there’s nothing in that.
8:12
At the moment, I’m just looking at my income statement accounts. Down here at the bottom, we can look at Balance Sheet, or we can look at everything if we want. Normally, you would do your budgets on your income statement accounts, so I’ll stick with that for the moment. And this is very simple. If I want to add in a budgeted amount for let’s find something. Office supplies, for example. And I want to say that I’m going to spend £100 on office supplies in January. It’s as easy as typing in 100. The system will start doing the calculations for the rules and the columns. And I can carry on February, March, April, May, I can do this for all of my accounts. Now you can imagine this would be a pretty long- winded way of typing in a budget.
9:08
So, there are better ways of doing it. That hundred pounds that we put in for January, I can drill down on that and I can see that £100 has been budgeted for my Admin Department because here at the bottom I’d selected only the Admin Department as my filter. I’m just going to delete this and get us back to an empty budget.
9:33
So once again we’ve got a bare empty budget and a much more intelligent way of starting my budget might be to take last year’s actuals and use them as the basis for next year’s budget. And we’ve got this fantastic functionality within NAV – Copy budget.
9:52
If I click on that, it gives me some options. So where do I want to copy? I can copy either from my actuals in my general ledger entries. Or I can copy an existing budget if I want to make a different version of a budget that currently exists. I’m going to copy 2018 actuals, so I’ll leave this at GL entry.

10:17
I’m only going to worry about my income statement accounts. So, I’m putting a filter on to ignore my balance sheet accounts, and I’m going to choose the 2018 date range. So, all the way from January to December 2018.
10:40
So, I’m copying from my actuals for my income statement accounts for the whole of 2018, and I’m going to copy this into my 2019 budget. I can then, if I want, choose an adjustment factor, If I just want to bring these numbers over as they all, I’ll leave it at one. If I just wanted to say, Let’s assume it’s going to go up by 10% this year, I will put in a factor of 1.1. So, it will multiply all those numbers by 1.1 to 10%.
11:13
Again, I can choose a rounding method. So, I can round it off to the nearest whole number or to the nearest 100 that’s rounded off to the nearest £10 and then I did change formula. So, because I’m bringing 2018 and I want to put them into 2019. I’m going say it’s the current month plus 12 months.
11:33
And I’m going to summarize that by month because I do monthly accounting. As soon as I put my options. I say, OK asks me if I’m sure and it does a copy.
11:47
Now I have last year’s, 2018’s actuals with 10% added rounded off to the nearest £10 and that is forming my budget for 2019.
11:59
I’m going to take off this department filter at the bottom, so that we can see everything.
12:04
And we can see on these accounts exactly how much we would spend if we just did a straight 10% increase.
12:12
Now, obviously, things are going to change this year, so my Admin Department, for instance, there might say that they’re not doing postage this year, they’ve got everybody’s e-mail addresses, so they want to take out their postage section.
12:28
So, because I’m just doing this for the Admin Department, I can choose a dimension. And on Postage, I can see that they’re planning to spend £60 to £70 a month on any one of these numbers. We can drill in, we could hit edit, and we can change these numbers, and we only anticipated to spend £20 in January, for example. That updates the number here. It updates all the totals. I can go down, and I can do this for every month during the year. Again, that’s a bit long winded.
13:04
There is a shortcut, I can look at the totals for the year, I can edit this list, and I can very quickly change all of those numbers. Updating this one, updated all of these, Now, perhaps for my Admin Department, where, maybe it’s the finance guys are doing this. They’re happy to come in here and type in these numbers 1 by one. But perhaps my sales team, they’re not so comfortable working in this format. They’d be much happier working in Excel for example. So, what we can do, let’s put it on the filter and just look at our Sales Department.
13:50
Now we can see the numbers that Sales would have if they just took last year’s actuals, but they want to tweak these numbers a little bit. So, I’m going to say, Let’s export this to Excel. Once again, the system asks me for a couple of options. What start they don’t want to use. So, I’m going to start at the beginning of the year. I’m going to carry on for 12 full months. You don’t have to do the whole year. You could do this in three months at a time, if 12 months is too much work, I want to do this at department level, and I say, OK, so, now, NAV is going to go off and create for me an Excel spreadsheet, which my sales team can use for their input.
14:42
It’s created the Excel spreadsheet. Let’s just open that up. Let’s scroll down to the 6000 and above accounts, and they can start changing their numbers on an Excel spreadsheet format so they can put in their anticipated sales for each month going through the year. Their anticipated purchasers. Let’s come down to the one we were looking at, which was, I think, postage. They are also going to be very good with postage this year, and they’re not going to spend anything on postage.
15:20
They can come in and they can tweak all these numbers to their heart’s content. When they’re finished, they simply save this worksheet somewhere where they’ll be able to find it.
15:36
I’ll just overwrite on one that already exists.
15:39
Then from within this main budgeting screen, again, it’s as simple as saying, Import from Excel. Again, I have some options. If I wish I’m going to put this into the 2019 budget. I’m going to replace the entries that are currently there. And the text that’s going to go with that importance can say, Import from Excel. You can type this and say as per Ronald, or whoever it was, who gave you this information. You say it OK? We open that spreadsheet, and in a few seconds. Our budget has now been consolidated with the input from our Sales Team.
16:29
And if we look at our Postage line, we can see there is nothing there for the Sales Team. And if we even remove that filter, we can see how that’s affected the entire company for all departments. And, once again, any one of these numbers, we can drill down. And we can see now, we’ve got our admin, £20. What was there for the sales team, has gone. We still have our production to put in their numbers.
17:00
That is how quickly and easily you can export a budget, import the budget, and have that consolidated up to the top line level.
17:11
That’s pretty easy. And once you’ve got a budget process that’s working, pretty easy, you might want to take this to the next level. And you might come along and say, half way through the year we want to revise this budget.

17:26
What I would do in that situation, I’d actually create a new budget. I call it 29 to be, say, it’s more revised Budget. OK, and I can go into my 20 19 B budget, which is a blank budget. This time, when I do my copy budget instead of copying Actuals from 2018, I can say, I want to copy what already exists in my 2019 Budget. I’m looking at 2019 entries, not 2018 anymore, and I do not need a formula to move those dates on by one year. I can take that out, and I will just leave those numbers exactly as they are. I said, OK, do I want to start the copy? Yes. Now it’s copying my existing 20 19 Budget, and it’s putting it into my 2019 B Budget.
18:30
And I now, should have, if my mouse will start working. Oh, I have made a mistake somewhere.
18:47
Let me slip in those parameters that are used.
18:50
There’s my mistake. I was supposed to copy it into 2019 B. Haven’t broken anything, don’t worry. And we’ll just give it a few seconds.
19:05
Once again, it’s copying across 2019 into 2019B. And I can see I now have a 2019 B, which is a copy of 2019, and I can let my sales team, admin team and production team update these numbers.
19:27
Now I’ve got two budgets existing for the year 2019 and 2019B. I would probably want to block my 2019, just to make sure that nobody else changes those numbers anymore.
19:51
So, now anybody makes changes. They can only change 2019 B And this is fantastic. I’ve got the two budgets, they are on my system. And as I said, what happens at the end of every month when you need to do your reporting of actual versus budget Historically and all those downloads and Excel spreadsheets, we can now start using internal tools within NAV to do that kind of reporting for us. If you have Power BI or Jet Reports, you could use those as well. And they would be bringing the actuals the budgets from within NAV, but let’s go and have a look at the account schedules. There’s a host of account schedules on this system. I’m going to go and look at trial balance.
20:39
Let’s have an overview, and by default, my trial balance just comes out bringing the balance. I can change that and say, let’s see Net change versus budget, And I want to see it based on my 2019 budget.
21:02
And we don’t really have much in for these later months, but if I go to previous periods I can see that I have, for January, my net change, nothing in the budget. Let’s use that 2019B budget instead. And scroll down to some of these expense accounts in the 8000 range. And I can see what I actually spent in January 2019 versus what was budgeted with the variance and the various percentage. This is how quickly I can get out an actual versus budget report against either of those two budgets that we’ve created. So, what we went through very quickly was creating a new budget. It is a very simple process. Once you have a budget, you can manually start typing numbers in there, which is hard work, or you could copy, either from an existing budget or from actuals in your system, to create this budget. You can then modify those numbers, you can export to Excel, modify the numbers in Excel, re-import them.
22:21
And then once you have your budget and you recorded your actuals, you can come to your account’s schedules. You can do a report of actual versus budget, or you could use your external reporting tools to report your actual versus budgets.
Questions
22:40
Right, OK, I would just take a couple of seconds to receive any questions. Please use the question box. But we do have one here already. So, it says, when we update a budget, we would like to include actuals up to a point, and then budget figures thereafter. How can this be done in NAV?
22:58
That is a really good question, and I’ve seen quite a few companies that do this. So, let’s go back to our budgets. So, I’m just going show you how to do this. So, let’s create a 2019C. And this is just for the purposes of demo. If I go into that 2019C budget, What I can do when I copy budget is I can say, I want to bring in my actuals just for these accounts, and I just want to bring them in for January.
23:41
I want to put them into the 2019C budget. I don’t want to round them off at all and I’m very happy with the date formulas.
23:53
I said, OK, do I want to stop the copy?
23:55
Yes, there wasn’t much to copy. So, it’s just copied the actuals for January. As you can see, the rest of the budget is blank. But now I can do a Copy Budget again. This time I can copy from my existing budget perhaps from my 2019B, just for those accounts. I’m going to do this from the first of February to the 31st of December. I want to copy it into the 2019 C, and I’ll bring those budget numbers through as they are. I say, OK, do I want to bring them across? And let’s give it a few seconds. It’s got to get to 9000 and something.
24:48
It’s brought them across successfully, and let’s just sit down to those 8000 range, where I know what the numbers look like. So, we have that very small number, which was the actual, in January, and then we have the budgeted numbers that we’ve brought across, So, I’ve got now a new budget which has a month of actuals and 11 months of budgets, which I can then let people start changing these numbers going forwards.
25:23
OK, can you have budgets for multiple companies? Yep. Each budget is per company. So, on this system, I am logged into my Cronus UK limited company, so these budgets are for Cronus UK. If I had other companies that I could choose, I’m not sure if I do on the system, I could go into the other company and create a new budget for that company, so each budget is company specific.
Five key takeaways
25:56
OK, so we would like to leave you with the five key takeaways about projects, which we’ll hope will assist you So you can have multiple budgets in NAV, perhaps one for each year or multiple. For example, base, revised, re-revised, or final. You can also have what if budgets, which help very much with planning. You can start from scratch, or you can copy existing information and amend as required. You can do budget versus actual analysis, either in NAV using account schedules, in Jet or Power BI. And also, finally, that you can use dimensions to drill down to any level of detail.
26:37
OK, so we hope you found this webinar, interesting and informative. As mentioned previously, this is the 13th of the series of Webinars, and we’ll be sending out e-mails to register for the next one, but we’ll also put a reminder about the webinar in the newsletter, as well. So, once we close the session, a survey will appear. Be great if you could respond with any feedback. But if you do have any further questions, please feel free to e-mail me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk. Thank you very much.