QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Copying Budgets and Creating What-if Budgets

If next year’s budget is almost identical to this year’s, you’d expect that copying your current budget and changing a few numbers would be quick and easy. But QuickBooks lacks a built-in mechanism for copying an existing budget to a new one! (A command that copies a budget would be convenient—even Quicken, Intuit’s software for personal finances, has one—but so far Intuit hasn’t added one to QuickBooks.) Similarly, because QuickBooks allows only one budget of each type for the same fiscal year, you can’t create what-if budgets within the program to see which one is the best.

To do any kind of budget modification beyond typing in values or using Copy Across and Adjust Row Amounts, you have to export your budgets to a spreadsheet program and make modifications or what-if copies there. Then, when you’ve got the budget you want, you can import the file back into QuickBooks to use the new budget. For example, you can export your QuickBooks budget into Microsoft Excel and copy the budget into several worksheets. One worksheet could be a bare-bones budget in case a client with shaky finances disappears. A second worksheet could represent your happy-dance budget if you snag that big new project. And a third worksheet could be your most likely results, somewhere between the two extremes.

Exported budget files list entries for fiscal years and accounts in no particular order. For that reason, the easiest way to create budgets or play budget what-if ...