In tough economic times (like today) establishing a reasonable budget, and sticking to it through these choppy waters, can mean the difference between navigating successfully to better economic times ahead and crashing on the dangerous financial obstacles all around us. Over the past couple of versions Sage Software has seriously beefed up Peachtree’s budgeting capabilities, especially in the Peachtree Premium and Peachtree Quantum editions. Just in the nick of time….

 For virtually everyone, Microsoft Excel is the “tool of choice” for designing and calculating budgets. Its “columns and rows” orientation make it the ideal tool for interactive, “what if” calculations. Excel, however, is not the best tool for maintaining a budget and tracking performance against “actuals”. Doing this essential step in Excel requires a lot of extra re-keying, or some complicated exports and imports. Fortunately, Peachtree plays quite nicely with Excel-based budgets these days.

 In Peachtree Premium and Quantum, you can establish as many different budgets as you need, and can select any budget to print on your financial statements to facilitate comparisons (Peachtree Complete allows only one budget). Any single budget can reflect up to four years of data: the two currently open fiscal years, plus one year prior to the earliest open year and one year following the latest open year.

 Budgeting can be performed for all of your accounts or for any range of accounts, using filters. Especially handy is the filtering available by account “type” (income statement accounts, expenses, etc.), or by account “segment” (Premium and higher only) to create department-level budgets. An existing Peachtree budget can be easily copied to a new budget, and recalculated using various formulas to test the new assumptions.

 The best thing about Peachtree’s budgeting capabilities, however, is how easily it interfaces with Excel. Import and export buttons are conveniently situated on the budgeting screen toolbar, making it a snap to get your budget data into Peachtree, and equally easy to get it out again for further work in Excel. TIP: When building your budget, first set your filters in Peachtree, then export a “blank” budget to get all of the relevant accounts quickly and easily into Excel, along with all the appropriate period column headers.

 Once you have your “baseline” data (accounts and periods) populated in Excel, do all of the normal budget construction directly in Excel, then when the budget is completed send the data back to Peachtree via a CSV file, which is simple to create in Excel (Save As…).

 It is also pretty easy to manipulate some of the budget data directly in the Peachtree budgeting screen, by using the “Autofill” button on the toolbar to complete a row, or by using the “Quick Action” buttons (Copy and Adjust) accessed via a right click of the mouse anywhere on the cell grid, to modify amounts by a fixed dollar amount, a percentage, or to round to the nearest dollar, hundreds, or thousands.

 Peachtree budgeting also works nicely with Peachtree Alerts, to automatically send a message to a selected user when any account is over budget for either a specified period or for the year-to-date budget.  With the Peachtree’s capabilities to handle attachments to records, you can even “attach” the original Excel budget to the Peachtree budget as a fool-proof “source document” audit trail.

 Peachtree won’t necessarily help you generate more income, but it can provide the tools you need for creating a good roadmap to follow – and monitor – through the twists and turns of a troubled economy.