Creating a budget
You create and manage budgets from Reports → Budgets. To create a new budget, you provide:- Budget type - income statement or balance sheet.
- Calendar year - the fiscal year this budget covers.
- Company - the entity the budget applies to.
- Name - a descriptive label (e.g., “FY2026 Operating Budget”).
Multiple budgets rather than versions
A budget has no version history. If you want an original board-approved plan and a revised mid-year reforecast to coexist, create them as separate budgets and name them so the distinction is obvious, for example “FY26 Board Approved” and “FY26 Reforecast Q2”. Budgets carry a draft, posted, or archived status, so archive the plan you have superseded rather than editing over it. Archiving keeps it readable for comparison while taking it out of the working list, and recovering an archived budget returns it to posted. Editing a budget in place overwrites what was there, with no history of the previous numbers, which is the reason to branch by creating a new budget rather than by revising the existing one. Budget groups help once you have several. Grouping the plans that belong to one planning cycle keeps a list that grows every quarter navigable, and it makes obvious which budget is the current one when someone else has to find it.Dimensional budgets
DualEntry supports budgeting at a dimensional level beyond the account. You add classification breakdowns to budget lines, such as department, location, or project, to create granular budgets. For example, you can budget marketing expenses separately for the North America and EMEA departments within the same account. Dimensional budgets align with the classifications you configure on your chart of accounts. When you run variance reports, DualEntry matches actuals to budget at the same dimensional grain.Comparing actuals to a budget
DualEntry doesn’t blend actuals into the budget figures or rewrite closed months for you. What a budget does offer is an actuals offset, which controls what actuals are shown alongside the plan, and it works differently by budget type. For an income statement budget, the offset selects a comparison year: the current year, or up to five years back. For a balance sheet budget, it selects a cutoff date: as of today, or up to twelve months back. Actuals appear in their own Actuals columns next to the Budget columns, month by month, so you compare the two rather than having one replace the other. The offset is set per budget, so one budget can compare against the prior year while another compares against the current one. Because the budget holds only its own plan and no version history, save a separate budget at the time if you want to preserve a point-in-time comparison for later.Variance reporting
You compare actuals against budget in the flux reporting module. DualEntry calculates dollar and percentage variances per account per period. You can view variances at the monthly, quarterly, or annual level, and drill into the underlying transactions that drove the variance. Variance reports are also available in the custom report builder, where you can add filters, group by classification, and schedule automated delivery.You can also view budget-vs-actual comparisons in the standard financial statements by selecting a budget overlay.
Import and export
You upload budget data via CSV for bulk entry, which is useful when your budgeting process starts in a spreadsheet. The CSV template is available for download from the budget creation page. The template includes columns for account, period, amount, and any classification dimensions you have configured. You can also build and update budgets programmatically through the/public/v2/budgets/ API endpoint.
Export any budget to CSV or Excel for offline modeling, board presentations, or archival. The export includes all line items, dimensional breakdowns, and version metadata. Scheduled exports are available through the custom report builder, which lets you automate delivery of budget data to stakeholders on a recurring basis.