Class reporting and budgeting

Hello there, Deadwood Al. Let me help you manage your class reporting and budgeting in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT).

For your first question, you can go to the Company tab. I'll outline the detailed steps below:

1. Go to the Company, click Planning & Budgeting then choose Set Up Budgets.
2. On the upper right of the page, click the Create New Budget.
3. Click the arrow for your preferred year.
4. Tick the Profit and Loss (reflects all activity for the year) radio button and hit Next.
5. Tick the Class radio button and hit Next.
6. From the Choose how you want to create a budget page, tick the Create a budget from scratch radio button and hit Finish.

After that, follow these steps on how to budget by class:

1. From the Set Up Budgets page, click the Budget dropdown and choose your created class.
2. Click the Current Class dropdown and input the amount in the field.
3. To enter the amount for each class, repeat the step 2 process.

For the second question, you can run the report by following the steps below:

1. Go to Reports.
2. Click the Company & Financial, then choose Profit & Loss by Class.

For the third question, you can customize the report to get the actual income and expense. Here's how:

1. Go to Reports.
2. Click the Company & Financial, then choose Profit & Loss by Class.
3. On the upper left, click the Customize Report
4. Hover over to the Filters tab, and click the dropdown below the Account.
5. Choose the All income/expense accounts.
6. Hit OK.

Let me know if you have further questions about managing your class in QuickBooks Desktop. I'm always here to help.

For the third question, you can customize the report to get the actual income and expense. Here's how:

1. Go to Reports.
2. Click the Company & Financial, then choose Profit & Loss by Class.
3. On the upper left, click the Customize Report
4. Hover over to the Filters tab, and click the dropdown below the Account.
5. Choose the All income/expense accounts.
6. Hit OK.

I don't see how this would produce a report showing actual compared to budgeted by class. This is the critical piece of the puzzle!  If classes are important enough to prepare a budget for, then they are certainly important enough to be able to know HOW WELL the operation is going in staying within class budget or exceeding or falling short of the planned (budgeted) result. Did I miss something, or did you fail to include a step to measure by class, or is such analysis not available in QuickBooks?

I appreciate the step you've taken so far, Deadwood. I also recognize the importance of pulling up a report that compares actual results to the budget by class in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT). I'll go further and share some information regarding this matter. 

QuickBooks Desktop natively shows reports by the class that demonstrate the actual income and expenses for each class and the budgeted amount for every General Ledger (GL) account. Once a P&L Budget by Class is created, the most relevant report to be generated is the Budget vs Actual Report.

Here's how:

1. Go to the Reports menu.
2. Choose Budgets and Forecasts.
3. Click Budget vs Actual.
4. Select the P&L Budget that you have created and click Next.
5. From there, Choose Account by Class from the dropdown then next and tick finish.
6. On the same page, you can customize the dates to pull up data from certain reporting periods and compare it to your Budget for specific income and expense accounts

More so, I attached this article to allow you to customize any report that you generate: Customize reports in QuickBooks Desktop.

I'll be here if you need anything else. QuickBooks Community is available 24/7. 

to JuryL

Thank you for your response: Questions:

* Let's say I have  10 classes (i actually may have more). If we create a budget for each class, will the total of the budgeted amounts for each account in each class roll up to generate the total for the company? I have seen posts where it describes that QuickBooks will NOT do this and that we would then have to manually add them together and enter a budget separately for each GL account without entering a class. This would be QB forcing users to waste their time doing something that the software should do. Please address this question.

And for your response regarding the actual to budget comparison reporting: I sincerely hope that you are correct in that response. I have also seen posts (more than one) that say QB does not do this kind of reporting (actual to budget by class). Do you know for a fact that QB will do this, and that if we do a P&L without specifying any class that it will generate a report for all classes combined?

I wasn't sure and so I tried it out.

RE: Can we budget by class?

Yes.

RE: Can we report on each class that would show P&L for each class?

Not quite sure I understand the question, but once you have created a budget by account and class, you can create a Budget v Actual report using that budget, several actually, that show different views of the budget.

RE: Can we get a report by class that shows what the actual income & expense is for that class AND the appropriate budgeted amount for each GL item?  

Yes. Here's an example - created after setting up the budget by class for one income account as a test.

As you start to create a Budget vs. Actual report, pick Account by Class:

The result, by account and class for the reporting period:

Thanks for following up with the Community, Deadwood Al.

I can certainly understand how an ability to have each total for budgeted amounts for each account totaled for the company could be useful and have submitted a suggestion about it as of today.

You can also submit your own feature requests while using QuickBooks.

Here's how:
 

1. In the top menu bar, go to Help, Send Feedback Online, then Product Suggestion....
   
   
    
2. Choose a Type of Feedback and Product Area (optional) from your available drop-down menus.
   
   
    
3. Enter any suggestions/feedback in the Here is my suggestion: field.
   
   
    
4. If you'd like, include your name/email in the My name is: (optional) and My e-mail address is: (optional) fields.
   
   
    
5. Select Send Feedback.
   
   

Your feedback's definitely valuable to Intuit. It will be reviewed by our Product Development team and considered in future updates. You can stay up-to-date with the latest news about your product by reviewing Intuit's Product Updates webpage.

You also have the option of checking our QuickBooks App Store for apps which may be able to help you achieve what you're looking to do.

If there's any additional questions, I'm just a post away. Have a great Wednesday!

Thanks Big Red Consulting: perhaps you can also answer the last questions I asked JuryL --- will the total of all budgeted classes roll up into an overall company/organization budget, or do we have to do that manually.

(In case you're wondering, in our current company file we are NOT using class to track various event income and expense. All these questions have to do with planning on utilizing classes in a new company file to avoid creating so many individual GL accounts to provide the event data.)

Sorry .... I should always include ....

Please don't suggest I submit Feedback.  I know the process for doing so, and have submitted several items over several years. If I submitted Feedback on this type issue, my grandchildren would be lucky to see it implemented in their lifetimes! I have very little faith in QB to implement "user suggestions" ... the people who actually use the product and know best what they need. I think QB designers think they know better than the users what is important, even though the designers in general have zero to very little real world experience.

RE: will the total of all budgeted classes roll up into an overall company/organization budget, or do we have to do that manually.

If you asking if there a Total croup of columns on the report, then yes:

Thanks. What I really meant was after entering all the class budgets, could I print a P&L that is not by class, and the total budgeted amounts on such a report would equal the total of all of the individual class budgets?  The overall organizational budget would be the sum total of all of the individual class budgets and the total of the income and expense actual totals would likewise be the total of all the actual activity that has been entered in all of the class actuals. ????

Essentially under the premise that each class is but a single component of the organization and therefore the grand total of each of the classes (actual activity and/or budgeted amounts) would equal the organizations total. The user shouldn't have to manually add all the totals together to get the grand total. True?  ?????

Also, your sample shows a wide report of a number of classes for the P&L: if I assumed that I could run a P&L actual to budget for only one class, would I be correct? Because our events (class reporting) occur at different times of the year, we would want to focus on an individual class when it was the time of year for that particular class. ?????