Budgets are built on the Budget Grid (Accounts Management → Periods & Budgets): one screen per financial year, your profit & loss accounts down the side, the year's periods across the top, and a Year column that adds each row up for you. Type a figure into a cell and it is that account's budget for that period; leave a cell empty and there is no budget for it. Nothing is kept until you press Save, which stores the whole tab at once.
If your company tracks departments, each department gets its own tab, plus an Unallocated tab for figures that belong to no department. Every amount lives in exactly one tab. The Total Company tab is the sum of all the others, worked out for you — you never type into it, so the total can never drift from its parts. Companies that do not track departments simply see the one Unallocated tab.
If your company also turns on Structure: departments under branches (Chapter 0), the tabs are grouped under their branch headings, each heading carrying the branch's subtotal — the sum of its departments' saved figures, worked out on the spot. Departments with no branch sit under a No branch heading. Grouping is only how the tabs are laid out: each tab is still one department, saved on its own, and the workbook you export and import keeps one flat sheet per department exactly as before.
Three helpers do the tedious parts:
- Spread — type an annual total beside an account and Spread deals it across the periods, evenly or following last year's monthly pattern. The parts always add back to your total exactly: the odd cent from rounding lands in the last period, where the screen says it does.
- Seed from last year — start from last year's budget or last year's actuals, with an uplift percentage if you want one, then adjust the figures that need adjusting.
- Fill across — copy a row's first figure into every period.
A budget can also arrive the way it was prepared: Export workbook downloads the grid as a spreadsheet (one sheet per department), and Import workbook reads an edited one back — you see every change it will make before you commit, and a file with any error in it changes nothing at all. The Total Company sheet is for reading and circulating; the importer will refuse it by name, because the total is computed, never typed.
Each year-and-department budget has a standing: Draft while you
work on it, Approved when it is the agreed plan (behind the
approve budgets permission), and Locked when the year is
settled. Only a Draft can be edited; an Approved budget can be
returned to Draft, a Locked one cannot. Older budgets made one
account at a time may hold a single annual figure instead of
monthly ones; the grid shows it as Annual (unspread) and never
rewrites it behind your back — Convert to monthly is the
deliberate step that spreads it.
Watching them is the Budget vs Actual report's job (7.10), and the Finance cockpit's findings carry the same comparison as an early warning: an account materially past its budget surfaces on the cockpit without anyone running anything. A budget never blocks a posting — it is a yardstick, not a lock. If an account needs protection, that is a permission or a credit control, not a budget line.