Accounting rules are based on faits accomplis but companies need to anticipate/predict events. Dynamics NAV offers some tools that can help to accomplish this, which we will cover in this chapter:
Budgets are an overview of planned costs, revenues, and resources over a specified period of time. Dynamics NAV allows you to create budgets for fixed assets, items, sales and purchases, and projects. But we will focus on general ledger budgets in this section.
With the general ledger budget feature, you can create multiple budgets for the same time periods, simple or complex budgets by selecting combinations of G/L accounts, periods, and dimensions. You can also copy budgets from previous periods or create your budgets outside the application, with Excel, and then import it into Dynamics NAV.
Let's create a new budget for the first quarter of 2017. Perform the following steps:
G/L Budgets
and select the related link.
01/01/17.12/31/17
.
1Y
in order to add one year to the dates. We are creating budgets for the CUSTOMERGROUP and AREA dimensions, so we have checked them on the Dimensions field.1.1
as the adjustment factor. We choose to compress movements on a monthly basis and to round amounts to hundreds.
Field |
Value |
Start Date |
|
No. of Periods |
|
Period Length |
|
Column Dimensions |
|
G/L Account No. |
|
You have already seen three methods to create budgets. Now, we will see when budgets can be used. Budgets are mainly to compare reality versus budgeted amounts to measure performance. Budget entries can be also used as a source for the cash flow management. We will cover those in the next section.
The Trial Balance/Budget report, found under Departments | Financial Management | General Ledger | Reports | Financial Statement, compares the balance of each account in the charts of accounts with its budgeted amount for a given period.
You can also use budgets on Account Schedules to measure performance in an aggregate way. In the Column Layout definition, in the Ledger Entry type field, you can select the Budget Entries value to base the calculation on budget entries. To see an example, navigate to Departments | Financial Management | Setup | General | Column Layouts and analyze the definition of the ACT/BUD column layout.