Budgeting, and a forecast that reads your ledger
Budgets against your own chart of accounts and cost centers, forecasts with the evidence attached, first drafts proposed from recurrence in your own history, and a QuickBooks Online connection for books that have not moved.
Zeno has a budgeting module. It’s the first thing we’ve built that looks forward instead of recording what already happened, and the design question was where the numbers come from. The answer is the ledger you already have, with you correcting it.
Budgets against your own chart of accounts
A budget is built against your GL accounts and cost centers, so the variance report is a subtraction rather than a mapping exercise. Scope a budget to a property, a project, a cost center, or the whole organization, and the accounts on offer narrow to the ones that cost center uses.
Forecasts, with the evidence attached
Forecasts are the line items: the expected outflows and inflows that make up the picture. The form is deliberately thin, taking an amount, an account, a date, and a cost center. You can stage attachments on a forecast as you create it, so the quote or the notice that justifies the number travels with it.
Suggestions from recurrence detection
The tedious part of a first budget is transcribing what already happens every month. Zeno scans the ledger for recurrence, looking for the same payee at a similar amount on a regular interval, and proposes a forecast for each pattern it finds: insurance every June, the water bill every quarter, the loan payment on the first. You accept, adjust, or ignore each one. Nothing gets proposed that isn’t already in your history.
QuickBooks Online, for the books that aren’t here yet
The module ships with a QuickBooks Online integration. Plenty of businesses that would use budgeting aren’t ready to move their general ledger, and there’s no reason to make them. Connect the QBO file and budget against those accounts and actuals.
Budgeting is available on request while we watch it against live books. A debt-payoff calculator on the same forecasting engine lands next week. [email protected].