About Budgets and Balances

Budgets and balances are one type of balance record used in FinancialForce Accounting. See Types of Balance Record for more information.

The Budgets and Balances object is a balance record suitable for use with Salesforce reporting.

Depending on how your organization (org) is configured, budget and balance records can be live balances (automatically updated when transactions are created), or secondary balances. If you want to maintain secondary (non-live) balances, you must keep them synchronized, either manually or by scheduled batch job. See About Balance Update for more information.

Warning:

In Mode 2, any edits to budgets and balance records will be overwritten each time a synchronization is run because they are recalculated from the Reporting Balance records.

The Budgets and Balances tab enables you to track the variance of actual period balances against budget.

The details of each budget and balance instance determine which accounting codeClosed A combination of up to six elements: a general ledger account, a single entity and up to four analysis dimensions, as recorded on a specific transaction line item. on a transaction will cause the actual balances to be updated for the appropriate period. These actual period balances are compared to the budget values that you have entered to calculate the variance.

Budget and balance instances can also store year-to-date (YTD) actual balances and cumulative balances for balance sheet accounts that track movements beyond the current financial year.

All budget and actual period balance values are expressed in both home currencyClosed The main working currency of the current company. and dual currencyClosed The currency in which your corporate headquarters reports financial statements. This defaults to, and is normally the same as, the corporate currency..

Note:

The budget and balance instances that you create must be supported by an equivalent intersect definitionClosed Defines the storage of actual period balances..

They must also have unique details within a company's financial year. For example, you cannot create a budget for a financial year that stores balances for the same combination of elementsClosed The elements of a full accounting code consist of a general ledger account, an entity, and up to four analysis dimensions. as another budget.

Once you have created a budget and balance instance, the element or elements that it tracks cannot be changed. If a budget and balance instance is created with errors, you must delete it and start again.