Create a budget workbook
Start the budgeting process by creating a budget workbook.
The budget creation is also referred to as the budget setup or budget configuration. The physical budgeting occurs after the workbook is created, using the workflow.
You base your budget on one of the Phocas databases to which you have access. There are two key types of databases, and therefore, there are two types of budgets: financial and operational. You create both types of budgets in the same basic way, however, there are a few different steps, so they are outlined in separate sections below. In both setup screens, the settings are organized into tabs, in which many options are automatically selected for you, to save you time.
Watch these other videos:
Phocas demo: Create a P&L budget in no time (brief overview)
PUG Training: Budgets & Forecasts 101 – revenue, Sales budgeting, and Demand planning
Prerequisites
Before you create your first budget workbook, it's important to:
Plan the budget structure: Get a clear understanding of how your organization currently budgets and at what level of detail. Consider if you want to make changes to the current process or if you want your budget to follow that structure.
It is best to plan how you want to structure your budget before you create it. Read the Best practices for efficient budgeting page to learn more.
Right after you create the budget workbook, you have the chance to adjust its setup but when you edit any of the budget values, you will not be able to make many changes to the workbook setup without losing those values.
(Financial budgets only) Ensure your Profit and Loss statement categorization is complete. Also, become familiar with the relationship between the Financial Statements and Budgets & Forecasts modules, and consider creating a custom statement for budgeting and forecasting purpose.
Identify who needs to access the budget: All users who access the budget workbook also need access to the Financial Statements module (to some degree) and permission to access the underlying database. You can then determine the level of access they need within the workbook.
Getting started
Rather than create a new budget workbook from scratch, you can clone an existing workbook and use it as the foundation for a new workbook.
Read the Best practices for efficient budgeting page before you start creating budget workbooks.
While you can create a financial budget from within the Financial Statements module (as explained in the next section), you can create both financial and operational budgets in Budgets & Forecasts, in two locations:
On the Budgets & Forecasts homepage, in the top-right corner, click Create budget.
Within an existing budget, in the top-left corner, click Budget > Create budget.

What happens next depends on your database access. If you have access to both types of databases, the Create budget screen displays, in which you need to select the type of budget you want to create, either financial or operational. If you only have access to one type of database, you skip the Create budget screen and go directly to the workbook setup screen for that type of database.

If you plan on having both operational and financial budgets, it's better to keep them in separate workbooks. Not only will this help improve performance, it'll prevent interdependencies and improve access control.
Financial budget
The financial budget is based on a financial database, which contains data from your financial statements.
Although you can create a financial budget in Budgets & Forecasts, the best place to do it is from within your Financial Statements module. Expand the following section for more information.
If you create the financial budget in Budgets & Forecasts, you must it set up as follows:
Operational budget
The operational budget is based on a database that contains operational data such as sales, purchases, and inventory. This data has more detail, such as the sales breakdown (by customer, product, sales rep, channel), primary and secondary class products, pricing, expenses by provider, headcount numbers, payroll expenses, and so on.
The setup for an operational budget is as follows:
Next steps
After you complete the budget setup, or automatically create and set up a budget via Financial Statements, you should consider taking the following actions:
Explore your new budget workbook to become familiar with its key elements and features. Expand the tip below to see how the budget setup corresponds to the output.
Edit the budget setup, if required, before you edit any of the budget values. For example, you might want to add or remove a level. Also, if you automatically created the financial budget, you’ll probably want to change the following items at least:
Name: This automatically generated name is Profit and Loss created [date], where the data is the date and time the budget was created. You might want to replace this with something more descriptive, such as Budget by Region and Branch 2025.
Period: The date range comes from the current period of the financial statement. Typically a budget looks at the time ahead, so you’ll probably want to change this current period to a future one and use the offset option. For example, enter an offset of -12 to use the previous year's actuals (January to December 2024) as the baseline.
Fix the baseline values, if required.
Proceed to add further detail to the budget workbook as required. For example, you might want to add worksheet tabs for your Balance Sheet and Cash Flow budgets.
Start the budget workflow.
Last updated
Was this helpful?