Reports → Budgets (at /budgets) is where you write down what you expect the year to look like, then watch how the real numbers compare. It's on the Business plan and up.
A budget isn't a prediction you have to get right. It's a yardstick. The value is in the variance — seeing in July that repairs are already at 140% of the year's plan, while there's still time to do something about it.
Create a budget
At the top of the page, give it a name (it starts as "Annual budget") and a fiscal year (ending) — budgets run over your company's full financial year, labelled by the year it ends in. Click New budget.
You can keep more than one budget for the same year, as long as the names differ — useful for a conservative case and an optimistic one. The name and year can't be changed afterwards, so if you get one wrong, delete it and create it again.
Enter your figures
Open the budget and you're on Edit figures. Every active income and expense account in your chart of accounts is listed, split into Revenue and Expenses, and you enter one annual total per account.
360books spreads that total evenly across the twelve months of the year. That's the whole model — you can't shape a month-by-month pattern, so a seasonal business is budgeting an average, not a curve. Enter positive figures for both revenue and expenses; leave an account blank if you're not budgeting it.
Only income and expense accounts appear. You can't budget a bank balance, a loan, or headcount, and you can't budget by project, customer or department.
Click Save budget when you're done. It writes the whole grid at once.
A budget per trading division
If you run more than one brand off one registered company, pick a division when you create the budget ("For: ABC Cleaning"). That budget is then compared only against that division's actuals — the report says so at the top, so a variance is never ambiguous about what it covers.
Leave it on Whole company for a single plan across everything, which is how every budget worked before and still does.
Division budgets are separate plans, not slices of a company one. They do not have to add up to a company-wide budget, and if you keep both, don't expect them to.
Budget vs actual
The Budget vs actual tab compares your plan against the books, from the start of the financial year through today.
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Budget (to date) | Your annual figure, pro-rated for the months elapsed so far |
| Actual | What's actually posted to that account this year |
| Variance | Actual less budget-to-date |
| Annual budget | The full-year figure, for context |
Accounts are grouped into Revenue and Expenses with subtotals, and a Net profit line at the bottom compares planned profit to real profit.
Variances are colour-coded rather than labelled: green where you're doing better than planned (more revenue, less spend) and red where you're doing worse. Accounts with neither a budget nor any activity are left out, so the list stays short.
Two things worth knowing about the numbers:
- Actual counts only posted ledger entries. Drafts never leak in — the same rule as every other report.
- Budget to date counts a month as soon as it starts, in full. On the 2nd of the month you're already being compared against that whole month's budget, so early-month variances look worse than they are.
Use Export CSV to take the comparison into a spreadsheet.
What it doesn't do
- No month-by-month entry — one annual figure per account, spread evenly.
- No copy from last year, and no "seed from last year's actuals". Every budget starts blank.
- No CSV import of budget figures — export only.
- No variance percentage, and no alerts when you go over.
- No drill-down from a variance to the transactions behind it.
- No budgeting by project, department or customer, and no rollup across companies.
- Budgets appear only on this page — not on the dashboard, not as a column on the Profit & Loss, and the AI CFO doesn't read them.
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