Is it possible to do projections in Manager? To give more information, we are 4 months into our 12 month accounting period, we can generate a report for our P&L and see the balance sheet, but on top of that, in the next 8 months we know that we are going to receive a set number of payments, and we also know how much our out goings will be for staff each month. What we’d like to be able to do is put in a lot of this data so we can see what our bottom line for the year will be, which in turn tells us whether we need to bring in more work, whether we have profit to invest etc.
My initial stab at doing something has been using journal entries to put in some numbers for the year, which seems to work to some extent, I wondered if there are any better ways to do this sort of thing?
There is no designed method for doing this. A budgeting module has been mentioned for the future, but rollout date is a complete unknown.
If you search the forum creatively, you will find some discussion about this subject. Several users have developed some innovative approaches, but all are workarounds. Sometimes the easiest way to forecast is simply with a spreadsheet.
If you try anything in Manager, I recommend creating a separate business. That way, whatever tricks you try with date changes, future transaction dates, and so forth, won’t be risks to your real accounting records.
Create a separate business and then via a Journal (dated the last day of the month) enter a budget for each month (so 12 Journals) for each income & expense account.
Then as each actual month is completed, edit that month’s Journal to reflect the actual figures.
The budget business Journals wont be balanced as that variation reflects the profit (loss) factor.