A budget is a financial plan that estimates an organization’s income and expenses for a specific period of time. It's a way to project how money will be spent, and to plan how to finance those expenditures.
If you are a rental property manager it is wise to plan for yourself or your rental owners the income and your anticipated expense to see the anticipated profit.
If you are a community association manager or self-managed HOA, you need to project the anticipated expense for the next fiscal year to see if the assessment fees you charge your owners based on your schedule is going to cover the expenses anticipated for the community. This can be for operational expenses but also for a longer term special assessment plan.
ManageCasa allows you to create a budget from a previous budget or start from scratch. It's as simple as picking your accounts and filling in the numbers. Our tool automatically splits the total into 12 equal parts to make it easier to track monthly progress.
And yes, we support whatever your fiscal year set up may be.
Add a Budget
- Navigate to Budget and then Click “Add”.
- Enter a Budget Name, the Company, Property or Association, the Fiscal Year (can be equal to the Calendar Year or start at any month of the year if not equal to the Calendar Year), and hit “Save”
- if you wish to do so, create the new budget by copying a prior year’s budget or prior yer’s actuals instead of starting from scratch
When setting up a budget, pick line items based on Accounts in your Chart of Accounts. You may filter on categories such as Income or Expense accounts and use the Search feature.
Remember that you will likely not have accurate figures. For many line items you are estimating based on past experience or planned expenses, like maintenance projects.
When you enter a number in the FY… column (all the way to the right), the annual amount will be equally spread across 12 months.
You can overwrite monthly amounts.
For quarterly income or expenses, add the number for the respective months when you expect the income or expenses, for example March, June, September, December.
Every time you enter a new amount, the system will auto save.
On the bottom of your screen you will see the summary of your Budget.
In the example below, you have some months where you project to spend more than your income. At the end of your fiscal year you project to have a net income of $13,600 (reserve account).
Update your Budget
If you need to make any changes, ManageCasa will automatically recalculate the Budget vs Actual so that you can keep track of how you are doing.
You may change any of the amounts, add line items.
You may delete line items from within the Budget view by clicking the Trash Can symbol at the right of a given line.
You may download or delete an entire budget from the list of budgets by clicking the three dots on the right of the respective budget line: edit, download or delete.
Run Budget Reports
In the Budget view, click on “Budget vs Actual”
or select the “Budget” section under “Reports”.
Select your Budget, specify a period that you would like to view and click “Run Report”.
If you are managing many Budgets across multiple associations or properties, you may select the Period, the Company, Property or Association, to find the Budget you want to run the report for.
Sample monthly Budget Report (year to date):
Once you see the Budget Report, you may want to hide columns based on your preference.
You can export the report as pdf or xls file or share the report with a message to one of your Contacts in the ManageCasa application (for example to other board members or property managers), in which case the real-time report will be stored as a pdf file in the Files/Documents section and shared with the selected members through the application.
Note that the budget reports consider actuals only for accounts selected.
Example, if you didn’t budget for Late Fees, actual late fees will not display in the report!
Best Practices:
- Start with your prior year actuals or pre-populate your new budget from a prior year budget. That can save you a lot of time over creating budgets from scratch.
- Make sure to add line items for all income and expense categories that may apply. To be safe, add more line items, even if your budget shows $0.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.