Start budgeting with Zoho Books, the easy way

Budgeting is an essential component for the long-term success of your business. But it can be a time-consuming process. So we at Zoho set out to make budgeting simpler and easier. You can now budget and measure your business performance in three simple steps: create budget, compare budget versus actuals, and find areas of concern.

Let’s look at how Zoho Books makes budgeting easier for your business. 

1. Create budgets effortlessly

When you create budgets, it can be time-consuming to manually fill in values for every period. Zoho Books offers you three different methods to create budgets. You can:

• Auto-fill your income and expense accounts
• Pre-fill based on previous years' actuals
• Enter data manually

Auto-fill your income and expense accounts

One common budgeting strategy is to build your budget based on the first period. If you take this approach, you will be projecting your budget for subsequent periods based on the amount you've set for the first period. 

In Zoho Books, you can enter the first period’s budget and specify an amount or a percentage to increase or decrease for the subsequent periods. When you apply the adjustment, the budget for all the periods (monthly, quarterly, or half-yearly) will be auto-filled. 

There are three ways in which you can auto-fill your amounts:

• Apply a fixed amount for each period
• Adjust by an amount for each period
• Adjust by a percentage for each period

Pre-fill based on a previous year's actuals

If you want to use the previous year's actuals as a yardstick, you can pre-fill your budget using any of your previous years' actual amounts.

If your business is projected to perform better than it did in the previous years, you can increase the pre-filled amounts by an absolute amount or a percentage for each period.Similarly, if you wish to budget less in subsequent periods, you can auto-fill the amounts with a downward adjustment.

Enter data manually

If you need to set a budget for your income and expense accounts that's unique for each period and doesn't follow a pattern, you can enter the amounts for each period manually.  

2. Compare actuals with budgets to evaluate your business' performance

At the end of each financial period, you will want to compare how your business has actually performed against the budgets you set for it. 

In Zoho Books, you can compare your budgets with your actuals using a comprehensive report. This report gives you a list of accounts with their budgets, actuals, and variances. Observing the trends of actuals versus budgets helps you identify the accounts that have gone over budget, so that you can take the necessary steps to keep them within limits in future periods.

3. Make informed decisions

Now that you have set your budget and compared it with the actual performance of your business, you will want to find areas of concern that require your attention.  

Once you find these areas of concern in your business, it's easier for you to decide how to allocate your budgets accurately in the future. Also, it will help you set more realistic targets and put your business on the road to success.

Start budgeting in Zoho Books and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Refer to our help document to know how to budget in Zoho Books. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at support@zohobooks.com. Stay tuned for more updates from Zoho Books!

Note: This feature is available only for certain plans of Zoho Books and Zoho Expense. Visit the Zoho Books pricing page or Zoho Expense pricing page to check if it's available in your current plan.