Before creating a budget

Before you create a budget, first you must activate chart of accounts categories that you'll use for your business. Only activated income and expense categories will be available for budgeting. To activate chart of accounts categories, click the Settings icon (circled below) and click Chart of Accounts in the Settings left menu.



For more information, see 5-step company setup > Choose a chart of accounts.

Create a budget

To create a budget, do the following:

1. Click Budget in Flare's main menu.
   
   
   
   
     The first time you view the budget page, you'll notice that only the bar graphs for Actual revenue, expenses, and net income for the entire year are shown. When viewing and editing the budget you can select any start and end date in your fiscal year. See View budget for more information.
2. Click the Edit Budget button (2 below).
   
   
   
   
3. Click open a chart of accounts categoryto edit the monthly budget for sub-categories (3 below). For example, click open Revenue to edit Services Revenue or Business Revenue.
   
   Click a month field and enter a value(4). Flare populates successive months with same amount. This is convenient for fixed monthly expenses, but you may enter different values in each successive month as needed.
   
   
   
   
4. To save your entries, click the accept check mark (5 below). To cancel and revert to previous values, click the cancel icon .
   
   
   
   
    You can begin entering budget amounts in any month. Just ignore previous months.
   Once you've created a budget, comparison to actual income and expense will be available when you view the budget from Flare's budget module (Main menu > Budget) or the dashboard.

Learn how to view your budget in Flare.