would you like to be able to control the budget of each individual job
well then you need to thoroughly watch this video quickbooks online for contractors budget by job
if you have any questions about this topic you can leave them in the comments section below
and i'll do my best to help you and of course if you feel the video helped you i hope you will
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the budget feature in quickbooks online is a very simple tool to use it's simply a data sheet that
remembers the amounts of each expense or other account that you input into the data sheet as
the budgeted amounts after putting in the amounts simply run the report called budget versus actual
and you will see all the differences between the budgeted amounts and the actual transactions
you can change any budgeted amount or any actual transaction and the budget versus actual report
for that specific budget will reflect the change immediately all you have to do is rerun the report
for the updated numbers so if you reopen the budget and change a specific budgeted amount
and then you run the report the report will change immediately and show you the difference between
budgeted and actual based on that change in fact even if you change the actual transaction and then
after changing the transaction for the time period of the budget you reopen the report still
the reports will change immediately to reflect the difference between the budgeted versus the actual
now just for this video i made these extra accounts to make them easier to see when we
get to the budget window all i did was change some names and add some accounts to the cost of goods
sold section of the budget so that we can stay at the top of the window and things will be a little
more clear if you like you can pause the video at this moment and enter these accounts in this way
so that you can follow along step by step but you don't have to because the demonstration will be
pretty easy to know what to do in your own account if you see how the budget tool works
so then the question is how are budgets saved in quickbooks online well each budget is simply a
data set that you can reopen and change you can have several budgets for each fiscal year the
time intervals for each budget that you make can be monthly quarterly or yearly and you can make
as many budgets as needed by any time interval per fiscal year per job and then once you make
a budget all budgets will be on the budget list for you to change or remove any time you want
for example let's make a monthly budget for the southwoods road job for the expenses for january
of 2022 we go to the top right and we click the cog wheel we go over to tools and go down
to budgeting of course if it's the very first time we're opening this particular window we get
this screen and we have to click add budget now the budget doesn't exist until we give it a name
and then click next in the bottom right here so i'll squash this a little but what we want is
this particular thing southwoods road job january of 2022 so we have to make sure that we choose the
fiscal year 2022 and the intervals are monthly monthly because we want specifically for january
of 2022 and let's name it s w r for south woods road jan 2022 now all we have to do is then
choose how we're going to uh subdivide we're going to subdivide by customer because customer is job
and we go we're going to click here and choose specifically the kirschbaum southwoods road job
that we're working on click this and then we click next now we have the opportunity to put in all the
budgeted amounts for that particular job for that particular uh fiscal year in the column of month
so let's scroll down and let's go ahead and put in the numbers that i said set up just for example so
the fiscal year 2022 by month just for southwards road and let's imagine
these are the budgeted amounts 800 600 500 400 should be pretty easy to put in right so we go 800
in the january column 700
600
500
400 and well let's just double check that there we go good and now all we have to do is click save
and when we click the x in the top right you can't see could can't quite see it here i'll
squash it down see this x now that we've already saved this with this name when we click x we go
back to the list of budgets like i mentioned and right now there's only one budget on the list but
you can make as many budgets as you like for each fiscal year and then within each fiscal year they
can each be subdivided differently by month or quarter and subdivided for each particular job
you could always edit the budget uh you could delete but most importantly you can run
budget versus actual now of course we don't have any transactions in the time period in which we
did the budget but let's go ahead and check the budget versus actual reports before recording
actual transactions and see what happens we click the pull down for this budget and we run budgets
versus actual reports now notice what it shows you it shows you for specifically the kirschbaum job
here we are in the expense section down here right now we're extremely under budget
you see because these were the budgeted amounts and the we did not have any actual transactions
so a negative number in the amount of over budget means that we are under budget and
the percent difference is zero because it's you know we're under budget rather than over
but the good news is what we can do is we can enter actual transactions for that time period
and then reopen the budget report and see what happens so if you like you can pause the video
and enter these two i'm going to pause the video and enter a thirteen hundred dollar delivery
for january 5th for southwoods road paid to ups and i'm going to enter a january 10th 300
repair job to the same uh south woods road just because i don't want to waste time on video and
we already know how to enter these things but if you pause the video to enter them make sure
you're entering the right date and amount so it goes into the right section of the budget in
order to properly compare budget versus actual so i'm pausing the video now and entering these two
and now that we've both had a chance to enter both of these transactions let's go ahead and
open the budget versus actual report and see what it would look like we click from the
pull down for the specific budget that we just made we click run budgets versus actual now of
course we have to scroll down to the section that we're looking at and scroll to the right until we
get to the kirschbaum southwoods road job now here we are these are the budgeted amounts and
these are actually these are the budgeted amounts because this is the budget column but in the
actual column we have 1300 for delivery only 700 was budgeted we're over budget cc the over budget
column is 600 and the budget is at 185.71 percent same thing with repair expense except the opposite
repair expense is under budget by 200 which means we've only used 60 percent of the budgeted amount
now just to really understand this let's change the budgeted amount of repairs
to 100 and see what happens we have to go back to the budget itself click the cogwheel budgeting
and we have to click we have to find the budget in this case there's only one on the list so we
click edit and we have to go down to our repair expense account and we have to change it to 100.
now when we click save in the bottom right
the changes are saved so when we close the budget window and go back to the list
and run budget versus actual after scrolling down to the expenses we're looking at
and scrolling to the right to get the kirsh bound job you can see that now uh repair expense
you see the budgeted amount changed to 100 the actual was 300 so now you're two hundred over
budget and you're at three hundred percent of the budget so it doesn't matter if you change
the budgeted amounts or the actual transactions when you reopen the report the numbers will fix
accordingly and this gives you total control over each budget for each job
you can learn everything you need in quickbooks regarding contractor features by watching the
full playlist that this video is a part of you can just click the link in the comment field
or under the first paragraph in the description field
and there's also links in the top right of the video as it plays