a good budget will help you keep track of your income and expenses in this video I'll show you how to create budgets using Zero's budget manager this is a really easy to use tool after that I'll show you how to import budgets into zero importing budgets might sound scary but don't worry it's really simple and I'll walk you through it then we'll look at how to compare the performance of your business against the budget doing this regularly will help you spot potential problems early on so you can take action to fix them so let's get started so let's create our first budget go to accounting and reports and here's the budget manager now in zero you can have as many budgets as you like so to add new ones just click add new budget for example you might use tracking to report on different areas of your business such as different departments or cost centers it's useful to have budgets for each different department to be able to compare departmental performance against budget but for now we're just going to work on an overall budget choose when you want the budget to start so I want my budget to begin in October I want to show three months of actual income and expenses we can see those in the white columns October November December seeing what our actuals are helps me create a better budget and I want a budget for 12 months in Zero's budget manager you can have a budget up to 24 months if you want longer then you need to import a budget you can import up to 5 years of budget data and we'll look at importing later on in this video for now we'll select 12 months and update so we can see our actuals for July August September we just enter our budget figures into these blue boxes so our budgeted sales for October are 15,000 I can simply type into the blue boxes for the remaining months but that's a bit of a pain zero makes it a lot easier with this green arrow you can apply a fixed amount each month so each month the Budget Sales figure would be 15,000 we can adjust the budget up or down by a set amount each month or we can adjust it by a set percentage so I'd like my budget sales figure to increase by 2% each month and I happen to know that my December sales are typically a lot higher so I'll just over type that figure for December and notice when I over type that figure for December it doesn't affect the remaining months and let's quickly enter the budget figures for purchases and again we'll increase this by 2% and we'll have a slightly higher figure in December so you can see it's really easy to use the budget manager in zero now I could carry on here and enter all my figures for expenses but it's going to be even quicker if we do this in a spreadsheet program like Excel or Google Sheets so let's export this budget to Google Sheets and we can see we've already got the sales figures and the purchases budget figures already entered all we need to do now is focus on the expenses now before I do anything I'm going to freeze my rows at the top just so we can see what we're doing a bit easier as we scroll down the page so I've got a load of months of budgets to enter now we're only partway through September at the moment so the September figure is likely to change so I'm going to copy August figures because my budgets going forward are going to be similar to August which was a full month so let's contrl C to copy the August figures contrl V to paste and I'll copy those figures for the remaining months so now my budget is looking pretty good um I think there's just one change I'd like to make I am attending a conference in London in June so I'll adjust the travel figure for June let's find my travel and let's put 5,000 in there okay so I'm pretty happy with this budget now I'm going to export this now you can export it as an Excel file or a CSV file doesn't really matter you can import both into zero so here I'll export this as an XLS file so let's jump back into zero and we can import that and so notice we're still on the overall budget all we've got in the budget manager is our sales and purchases at this stage let's import that budget browse to our file and import and confirm and that's our overall budget entered in the budget manager screen pretty easy right now because my business operates in different locations north south east and west I'd like to create budgets for each tracking category so let's add a new budget give this a name so this is a budget for my North Region and we can filter by tracking category options so I'm going to filter by North Region let's enter the budget figures let's say 25,000 and again we'll increase that by 2% each month and I only track my departments by I only track sales for each department I don't bother looking at expenses so this is really quick we'll just save that budget so that's my North budget done I'd also like to create another budget for my South Region now zero lets you copy existing budgets the only budget you can't copy is the overall budget not sure why that is to copy a budget click the edit option give this budget a name now if you were doing another overall budget here you just leave the region to be do not filter but here we're going to filter it for South cuz we're creating a budget for our Sou South Region and be careful here don't save if I save this will overwrite my North budget I don't want to do that I want to save as copy so click that drop down next to save and save as copy and you can see now I've got three budgets in zero really quick really easy now before I start comparing my performance against budget I need to bring in some historical budget figures cuz I don't have any budget figures before October so I'm going to import one final budget and I've got a budget with 5 years of data so let me show you that on screen so here you can see a budget with figures from September 2022 all the way to August 2027 you can see loads of columns on here a lot of data let's import this into zero so back on the budget manager screen we're going to add a new budget I don't want to overwrite any existing budgets here now give it a name so I might just call this five-year budget so we know what it is I don't want to filter and let's import a file and here's my 5year budget this one's a CSV file and confirm and great we've now got four budgets in zero let's look now at a couple of ways to use these budgets to track business performance the easiest way to compare actual against budget is using the budget variance report so choose your date range here we'll choose this quarter choose which budget you want to compare performance with we'll leave this to be overall budget and update the red and green arrows are a really useful visual green shows a positive variance so either your income is more than budget or your expense is less than budget red is negative variance so your income is lower than budget and your expense is higher than budget so the first four columns on the left show the actual against budget with a variance column and a variance percentage column and then towards the right hand side you've got the year-to DAT figures and if you want to focus on a particular department or cost center you can filter this report by tracking category so click filter here will filter for the North Region and we'll compare the actual performance of our North Region to the north budget and update and very simply we've just got our sales because that's all um the data that we've got in zero for the North Region we don't bother tracking anything else for the North Region another really useful tool for keeping track of your key numbers is the account watch list on the dashboard let's head over there so in the top right I've got all my key accounts that I want to keep a close eye on so we can see this month's figures and year-to dat figures click the three dots and you can show a budget column so very quickly you can spot any variances and take action if anything looks a little bit strange let me know if you found this video useful by giving it a like and if you got any questions about using budgets in zero let me know in the comments thanks for watching [Music]