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Budgets are extremely useful for estimating the future financial performance of the business. You can use a budget to set a plan for the future and compare current results against the budget for performance measurement. 

We highly recommend importing a budget for each company in Fathom to get the most insight into your business performance.

You can import a budget into Fathom directly from:

You can also choose to import a budget via Excel. This is useful if you use other tools for creating your budgets or if you are importing your financial data from Excel, QuickBooks Desktop, or MYOB AccountRight.

You can use budgets in several different ways within Fathom, including:

In 'Step 5 - Targets' of the company settings, Fathom allows you to set targets for your KPIs. You can automatically use your imported budget figures as targets for any active default KPIs (i.e., that draw data from the P&L or Balance Sheet).

You can do this by activating the green 'tick' under the column 'Use Budgets.

Importing a budget allows you to compare your actual results against your budget figures. Some examples of where you can use this within Fathom include (but are not limited to):

Combine your actual and budget results to project the entire financial year. This is available for:

When creating a forecast in Fathom, you can link your imported budget to the forecasting tool. This allows you to build your Profit & Loss forecast directly from your budget. You can also use the 'Link to Budget' value rule after creating a forecast to link Profit & Loss accounts to the budget.

Yes, you can create a budget for your company with our forecasting tool. You can save your main forecast or a forecast scenario as your company's budget in Fathom.

To learn more about saving a forecast as a budget, our 'Can I save my forecast as a budget?' article.

You can learn more about our forecasting tool in general with our 'Getting Started with Fathom Forecasting' article.

You can have one overall budget for a company in Fathom.

For QuickBooks Online companies, you can import one budget for each financial year, creating one continuous budget in Fathom.

For Xero companies, you can import one overall company budget and one budget for each tracking category imported from Xero.

For details on the budget import features and restrictions, please view the specific budget import article for your source accounting system:

You can import divisional budgets for QuickBooks Online and Xero companies.

If you wish to add divisional budgets for MYOB AccountRight Live companies, you must import the divisions as standalone entities in Fathom.

More information on importing divisional budgets is in the following help article: Adding Budgets for Divisions.

You cannot directly import a budget for a consolidated group.

Fathom will automatically 'roll up' the budgets of each underlying entity within the group. The totalled budget will be the budget for the consolidated group.

If you wish to apply a budget directly to the consolidated group, a workaround would be to import that budget directly for an underlying company and remove budgets for any other underlying companies. This budget will then flow through into the consolidation.

Additional knowledge & common questions