Creating A budget
Before you start: Ensure that you have input a bank account and a financial period for this block. These can be found in ‘Block’ > ‘Block Accounts’ under ‘Bank Accounts’ and ‘Financial Periods’ respectively. Ensure that your financial period is not overlapping any other financial period.
If you are using a bank account for all blocks: If you have an account which is to be used globally please set this up in ‘Branch Finance’ > ‘Bank Accounts’
You will need to make sure you have at least one schedule set up before you begin. If you require help setting up a schedule please see 'Uploading/Creating Your Schedule Contributions (Apportionment)'
To begin creating a budget, we navigate to ‘Block’ > ‘Block Accounts’ > ‘Budgets’. Once here we select ‘New Budget’.
The budget consists of 4 tabs as shown below.
The ‘Details’ tab holds all details shown above. This is the basic information regarding the budget.
- Budget name: this will show in Resident and on top of the PDF copy of your budget
- Financial Period: every budget needs to be linked to a financial period. This will be important for all reports created by the financial period and year-end pack
- Invoice Frequency: This dictates how many times in the period the Leaseholders are to be invoiced and creates a group of invoices per period to be raised when ready.
- Custom Id: We can assign an Id to our budget but this is optional.
- Invoice Item Description: This allows us to choose what information is used as the description for the invoice item. It will show next to the invoice amount.
- Bank Account: This will link the budget and all invoices to that bank account
- Schedules: This lists all the schedules that have been created. By ticking the box next to the schedule name we can choose which one we want to use
The ‘Amounts’ tab allows us to choose each schedule and input the contribution amounts within:
Tip: If nothing is showing once we choose our schedule then chances are there have been no categories assigned to the schedule yet.
We do not have to add amounts to all categories. Those we leave empty will not show in the budget once we approve it.
The ‘Totals Per Unit’ tab shows the annual amounts and breakdown of what will be invoiced. Here is where we will check that the amounts are correct.
Once we are happy that these are correct we can approve the budget by clicking ‘More Actions’ > ‘Approve’.
Now that we have approved the budget the ‘Demand Dates’ tab will show like this (depending on the frequency chosen. This is half yearly):
We can choose here whether the invoices will generate themselves based on the dates we choose in the ‘Start’ and ‘End’ dates and whether they will automatically email to the leaseholders.
Once we have chosen this and made sure the dates are good then we can click ‘Generate’ for the period we are raising.
This will create an invoice group for this period. Here we can see the invoices by clicking on the ‘Invoices’ tab which will now be showing the number of invoices raised in a small circle.
We have options here to view, download, or send the invoices.
The email icon will turn green when an invoice has been sent out to a leaseholder and will give us a date, time and the name of the user who sent it when we hover over it.
To send or download all of the invoices we simply click ‘More Actions’ and we will have these options. We will be given the option to download all invoices, invoices based on email availability, or based on preference (which can be selected in the owner profile).
Please bear in mind that after you approve a budget you will not be able to amend any figures (as this may affect payments). Once approved, you will still be able to make some minor changes, such as changing dates or descriptions.
You can also re-open your budget using an option in 'More Actions', but this will delete all invoice and payments associated with them. It is not recommended you re-open your budget late in your financial year as you might lose all the work you have done for reconciliation.