Being able to prepare budgets for different financial scenarios gives you greater control and insight into your business. A key way that NetSuite helps you do this is through the Multiple Budgets feature. You can enable this feature under the Advanced Features section of the Accounting tab in Enable Features. Let’s take a closer look at the NetSuite Multiple Budgets feature and how it works.
Multiple Budgets Overview
What does the NetSuite Multiple Budgets feature add that you don’t already have with the basic budget functionality? With the standard budget functionality, you can create a budget for your company that helps you estimate and predict upcoming revenue and expenses. For any account, you can create a single budget for each accounting period.
With Multiple Budgets, however, you’re able to take your budgeting to the next level in two key ways.
First, you can create unique budgets for each of your subsidiaries. As you can imagine, this is essential for companies that have OneWorld!
And second, Multiple Budgets allows you to use budget categories. When you create new budgets, you’ll need to select the appropriate budget category. This is just another way for you to keep your finances well organized.
Budget categories allow you to create more than one budget for the same time period and criteria. This allows you to compare different possibilities, even setting up best and worst case scenarios to better help you visualize potential income and expense totals.
Using Multiple Budgets
Let’s see what using the NetSuite Multiple Budgets feature looks like.
Create a Budget Category
We’ll start by creating a new budget category. To create a budget category, navigate to Setup > Accounting > Setup Tasks > Accounting Lists > New, and choose Budget Category from the list.
On this page, you’ll name your new category and determine whether or not this category should be available across multiple subsidiaries. In that case, you would need to select the Global checkbox. Then, save the page.
Set Your Budget Parameters
Next, you’ll need to create a budget. To create a budget, navigate to Transactions > Financial > Set Up Budgets. The first step in creating a budget is to set certain parameters, which you can do on the header level of this page.
On the header level of your new budget, you’ll choose the accounting book associated with this budget, the subsidiary, and the year. When Multiple Budgets is turned on, you will also need to select the Budget Category from the list of categories you have created. If you are using a global budget category, then the Currency field will display the base currency of your company.
You can narrow down the applicability of this budget by connecting it to a specific customer and/or item. You can also connect this budget to a department, class, or location. And finally, you can choose an account type to limit the accounts that appear in the list.
Create a Budget for Specific Accounts
After filling out the header information for your new budget, you’re ready to create a budget for specific accounts. You’ll see a list of accounts at the end of the new budget page. The accounts that are available will be based on the account type you selected as well as the subsidiary and any other classifications you selected.
So how does creating budgets for these accounts work? In the list, you’ll see account names on the left and accounting periods on the right. You can enter different amounts in each accounting period or you can enter the same amount in each accounting period. To save time, you can enter a single amount in the first accounting period column next to an account, select the Apply checkbox for that account, and use the Distribute and Fill buttons at the top to auto-populate the remaining accounting periods.
After you have created the necessary budgets, save the page.
Create Multiple Budgets for One Account
To create multiple budgets for one financial account, you’ll go through the entire process of setting up a new budget with the same parameters as one of your existing budgets. The only change you’ll make on the header level is that this time you’ll select a different budget category.
You’ll notice that the same accounts you had previously created budgets for do not display the amounts you had set under the previous budget category. Instead, you can enter new amounts for each of these accounts.
Conclusion
Once you save your new budget, you now have two separate budgets for the same accounts during the same time period. Visualizing potential income and expense totals and accounting for different scenarios is made simple with the NetSuite Multiple Budgets feature.
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