Next week’s release will sport one of our favourite features – newly invented.
Creating a budget takes time and, just like the early industrialists, sometimes you need a factory to create or modify many of them at once. We’ve taken the Budget Factory you’ve known for years and given it a facelift in Calxa online – not just a cosmetic one but one that will put more power at your fingertips
We’ve streamlined the flow so there are fewer steps and made some of the options clearer. Both beginners and advanced users should find it simpler to use.
The most common use for it has always been creating next year’s budgets for the organisation or for multiple cost centres. That’s still central to the functionality but it’s a bit more obvious now that you can also use it for bulk edits of existing budgets (to increase all income lines by 10% for example).
Managing Multiple Years
While most people do one year at a time, there are times when you want a quick, simple forecast for the next 3-5 years. The Budget Factory is ideal for this task. In the older version it applied the same percentage changes to each year, which wasn’t always realistic. Now you can specify changes to Income, Cost of Sales, Expenses and Other Income/Other Expense accounts year by year. They’ll default to all being the same but you have the choice to update them individually as you need.
Budgeting for Profit – Back to Front
Rather than starting at the top (the income end), sometimes it can make sense to begin at the end. What profit are you trying to achieve?
You can now do this in the Budget Factory, as long as you’ve set the Cost of Sales option to calculate as a percentage of Income – this makes perfect sense for retailers, cafes, manufacturers and many other businesses. Now set the profit you want and the Budget Factory will calculate the income you need to meet that goal. Then your challenge is to go out in the world and do that! ! Our Building Budgets Back to Front article explores this budgeting technique.
Importing budgets is close!
We are putting the finishing touches to the budget export/import process online. Testing will commence in another week or two so it’s not far away.