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Are you trying to create a new budget in Quickbooks? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’re going to walk you through the steps of creating a new budget in Intuit’s popular Quickbooks accounting software.

When you are ready to begin, go ahead and fire up your Quickbooks accounting software, at which point you should select Company > Planning and Budgeting > Set Up Budgets. This should open a new window titled “Create New Budget,” which as the name suggests allows users to create new budgets. Keep in mind, however, that if you’ve already created a budget, Quickbooks will display the “Set Up Budgets” window instead. If you see this window, you’ll need to select the “Create New Budget” icon to display the appropriate window.

Next, you need to specify the fiscal period for which you are budgeting. The buttons within the aforementioned window allow you to specify this information. If you are budgeting for 2016, for instance, simply choose the year 2016 by selecting the buttons.

You must now decide whether to create a profile and loss or balance sheet budget. When creating a profit and loss budget, you must choose the “Profit and Loss” button > Next > and then repeat the steps mentioned above. When creating a balance sheet, simply click the “Balance Sheet” button > Finish > and repeat the steps mentioned above.

So, what’s the difference between these two formats? Profit and loss budgets include budgets for the amount of revenue or expense that you expect for the defined period. On the other hand, a balance sheet budget is a budget for the ending account balance, or in other words the ending account balance for the asset, liability or equity for the defined period.

You aren’t out of the woods just yet, as there are a few other steps you must take to create a budget. In the “Additional Profit and Loss” window, you’ll need to specify the additional profit and loss budget. This step is only necessary, however, when creating a profit and loss budget, in which case you’ll need to choose the “Customer:Job” button to see the extended budget with the Job details, followed by “Class” to include the class in your budget or “No Additional Criteria.”

If you want to budget by class, you’ll need to enable class tracking. You can read through previous blog posts published here for more information on how to enable class tracking in Quickbooks.

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!