Budget Inquiry

Budget Inquiry puts your budget next to what actually happened. It reads a period, groups the accounts the way your chart of accounts does, and shows Budget, Actual, Variance and Achieved % on every line — with class and group totals, parent-account roll-ups and a net profit at the bottom.

Where to find it

Go to General Ledger > Budget Inquiry. It needs the GL analytics permission.

The summary cards

The columns

Accounts roll up into their parents, groups total, and classes total, so you can read the statement at whatever level the question is being asked at.

An off-scale achieved percentage says so rather than printing a meaningless number. A tiny budget against a real spend produces a ratio in the thousands, and a figure like that in a column of percentages is worse than no figure at all.

One account, month by month

Open an account to see it across the months of the year with to-date totals. That is where a variance becomes explicable — a year that looks over budget is often one bad month rather than a steady overspend, and the two need different responses.

The purpose behind a budget

Each budget's purpose, as recorded when it was entered, is shown alongside it. Budgets outlive the conversations that produced them, and a note saying what a figure was for is often the only thing that makes a variance interpretable a year later.

Getting from here to the detail

The printed version

Budget vs Actual under General Ledger reports prints the same analysis as PDF or Excel, with options for account group, branch, department, budgeted accounts only, and month by month.

Related pages

• Budget Entry — where budgets are set
• GL Inquiry — the postings behind an actual
• GL Account Groups — the grouping used
• Profit and Loss — actuals without the budget