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 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 are able to 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 a number of different ways within Fathom, including:

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

You can do this by ensuring the green 'tick' is activated, 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 create a projection of 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 off of your budget. You can also use the 'Link to Budget' value rule after a forecast has been created 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.

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

You can only have a single budget imported for a company in Fathom at any given time. 

Budgets can only be imported for individual entities in Fathom. 

If you wish to add a budget for a division, you will first need to import the division as a standalone entity in Fathom. Note that this would then be considered as a separate entity for billing purposes.

More information on this process is in the following help article: Adding Budgets for Divisions.

Right now, you're not able to directly import a budget for a consolidated group.

Fathom will automatically 'roll up' the budgets of each underlying entity within the group. The totaled 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.