GL budgets and financial reports

GL budgets hold a planned amount per account per fiscal period. Once they’re in, Financial Report Designer can print actuals next to budget on income statements and other GL reports. Typing hundreds of account-period amounts by hand is slow, so most companies build the budget in Excel and import it.

Before you start

• A Budget Code exists for this budget (Financial Management > General Ledger > Setup > Budget Code). Codes let you keep several budgets side by side, such as Original and Forecast. One code can be the default for reports.
• The book and fiscal year you’re budgeting for exist, with their periods. The book’s chart of accounts and fiscal calendar decide which accounts and periods the budget has.

Loading a budget from Excel

1. Open Account Budget (Financial Management > General Ledger > Setup > Account Budget).
2. On the budget detail, filter to the Book, Budget Code and Fiscal Year you want.
3. From Actions (the Overflow menu in Kinetic), choose Export Budgets. In Budget Export Process, give the output file a recognisable name. The export can only be written to the server (Server:\), not your PC.
4. Download the file with Server File Download, choosing the User directory.
5. In Excel, fill in one row per GL account: the account, its description and an amount for each period. Keep the columns and header exactly as exported.
6. Back in Account Budget, choose Import Budgets, select your file and import it.
7. Open a few accounts for the fiscal year and check the period breakdown matches the spreadsheet.

Tip

Export first even for a brand-new budget. The export gives you a template with the exact layout the import expects. Building the file from scratch is the most common reason an import fails.

Getting the signs right

Budgets follow the same debit/credit convention as the GL:

Account type	Enter	Example
Expense	Positive amounts	Travel budget of 5,000 per quarter
Revenue	Negative amounts	Sales budget of 250,000 per month entered as -250000

If budget-vs-actual reports show revenue variances with the wrong sign, the revenue budget was usually loaded as positive.

Other options on account budgets:

• Copy Budget copies budgets from one fiscal year to another in the same book, based on either the prior budget or the prior actuals, which you can then adjust.
• Selecting Cash Flow Analysis on an account includes its budget in the cash flow tracker’s expected expenses. Don’t use it for sales accounts; cash flow already includes sales from open orders and invoices.

Financial Report Designer

Epicor doesn’t ship ready-made financial statements. Financial Report Designer (FRD, Financial Management > General Ledger > Setup > Financial Report Designer) is where you build them: balance sheets, income statements and any other report grouped and totalled by GL account.

• Rows define the lines of the report: headings, account ranges or categories, subtotals and totals.
• Column sets define what each column shows: actuals for a period, year to date, prior year, or budget for a chosen budget code, plus calculated columns such as variance.
• The Report Wizard builds a starting balance sheet or income statement for a book. It needs at least one net income category defined in the chart of accounts.
• Syntax Check validates the definition before you run it.
• Definitions can be exported and imported, so you can build them in a test company and move them to production.

Reports run from FRD produce a spreadsheet you can open in Excel.

Related pages

• AP payments, ACH and remittance advice
• Inventory transactions and WIP reconciliation