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Finance and Accounting · Daily operations · 9 min read

Budgets and budget control

Build a budget, have it approved, compare it with actual spending, count commitments, and warn or block when spending passes it.

Required permission: report.view, budget.manage, budget.approve

Before you begin

  • The Planning menu and its screens need report.view to open. budget.manage creates and edits; budget.approve approves.
  • The budget feature is on for the company (it is on by default).

Create a budget

  1. Open Finance > Planning > Budgets and press New budget.
  2. Enter the Name, the Scenario (Original, Revised, Forecast, Best case or Management plan), and the From and To dates. A budget covers 1 to 24 months.
  3. Press Create. The budget is a draft named after the year and scenario, version 1. A second budget of the same scenario and year is refused; make a new version of the first instead.

Enter the rows

  1. Open the budget. In the CSV box, paste a header row account,period,amount plus any dimension columns, for example department.
  2. Each row has an account code, a period (2026-03 or annual) and a positive amount. Only income and expense accounts are accepted, and the period must fall inside the budget.
  3. Press Save lines. Saving replaces every earlier row.

An annual row is split equally over the months, and the last month takes the rounding. Example: AED 10,000.00 over 12 months is 11 months of 833.33 and a last month of 833.37.

Approve and revise

  1. A different user with budget.approve presses Approve. The builder cannot approve their own budget, and a budget with no lines cannot be approved.
  2. An approved version is never edited. Press New version to copy it as a draft; approving the new version marks the old one Replaced.
  3. Discard draft removes a draft that no policy uses.

Compare with actual

Open Finance > Planning > Budget against actual, choose the budget and optional dates. Each account shows Budget, Actual (from the ledger, leaving out year-end closing entries), Variance, percentage, Committed and Available.

Worked example. Marketing budget AED 30,000.00 for January to March, actual AED 34,500.00: variance AED 4,500.00 or 15.0%, unfavourable for an expense. For an account with budget 1,000.00, actual 300.00 and open commitments 200.00, Available is 1,000 - 300 - 200 = 500.00.

Commitments

Open Finance > Planning > Budget control > Commitments and press Add commitment with a description, an expense account, an amount and a date. Release it with a reason when the money will not be spent. Confirmed purchase orders for services not yet billed are counted automatically.

Control spending

  1. Open Control policies and press New policy. Choose the Approved budget, an account range (Accounts from / to), the basis (Against the whole budget or Against the months so far), a Tolerance over budget (%) and At the limit: warn and let it through, or block unless overridden.
  2. Choose whether commitments count as spent and whether accounts with no budget line are also controlled (their limit is 0).

Worked example. Block at the limit with a 10% tolerance, budget AED 12,000.00 for the year and AED 12,500.00 spent. The limit is 12,000 x 110% = 13,200.00. A posting of AED 600.00 takes spend to 13,100.00 and passes. A further posting that would pass 13,200.00 is refused. With "warn", the posting goes through and the warning is recorded in the audit trail.

Override a block

  1. Press Request an override on Budget control > Overrides: the expense account, May exceed the budget by, Works until (up to 90 days) and a reason.
  2. A different user with budget.approve presses Approve (or Refuse with a reason).
  3. The accountant posts again. The override is used up as excess is charged.

What happens next

Every posting goes through the check, whether from a manual journal, a bill or payroll. Reversal, year-end, opening, exchange and expected-credit-loss entries are never checked.

Good to know

  • A policy keeps pointing at the version it was built on. After you approve a new version, edit the policy to choose it, or it stops controlling anything.
  • With a dimension filter on the report, commitments show 0.00.
  • All purchase-order commitments are counted on one expense account, so other accounts' Available can be overstated.
  • Turning the Budgets feature off hides the menus, but an active blocking policy still applies to postings.
Updated 3 October 2026