If you use a Director Brand and have the same Budget Periods at all of your Store locations, you should set your Budget Periods at Director. This allows you to set up the periods only once and push them to all locations, as well as see all Budgets for your Stores up at Director. You can do this from the Director Level by:
1. Navigating to your Profile Name in the top right corner > Director Settings > Director Configuration > turn on the Corporate Budgets setting > click Save Configuration.
2. Once Corporate Budgets has been enabled you will then see a Budgets tab under Trackers > Budgets.
3. With Corporate Budgets enabled you can create Budget Periods for all your Store locations. You'll hit +New Budget > Enter in the Start & End Dates for your Period > hit the green +New Budget.
4. Once you have set your Budget Period(s) you will need to perform a Store Sync to push down those Budget Periods to your Store locations. Store Sync > Sync Stores.
5. You can now navigate down to your Store locations and Create/Edit Budgets for each Store within that Budget Period created at Director. Navigate to a Store > Trackers > Budgets > find your Budget Period.
Creating Budgets in a Store
1. From Trackers > Budgets click the Budget Range that you want to enter data for.
2. By default the page will be blank. Click +Add at the bottom and then select either Add Account to select a specific GL Account, or select Add All Accounts to have all your GL Accounts added to the budget. If you select Add All Accounts you can easily type in the relevant data to either the Sales Forecast, Cost %, or Budgeted Amount value for each row.
*If you use Classes, you'll have an additional dropdown to append to the GL Account.
3. If you select Add Account you will then have the option to enter the budget data by either Budget Amount or Sales Forecast. If you select Budget Amount you can enter the budgeted amount for the period as well as the Cost %, and then the system will calculate your Sales Forecast using this data.
Alternatively you can select Sales Forecast and enter Cost % or Sales Forecast, and the system will calculate your Budget Amount from there. Once you've entered the appropriate values click +Add Budget Account.
GL Mapping
An important component of your budget being able to function properly is having all your Categories mapped to the relevant GL Code in Books. These GL Mappings are used to impact the budget from the order, as orders do not otherwise have GLs associated with them. In order to set up your GL Mappings you need access to Books. Please see the article titled Mapping General Ledger (GL) Accounts for further details on this process. If you'd like to check what GLs your Categories are mapped to you can do this by clicking your name at the top right > Store Settings > Item Categories, there you will see what GL Account (if any) is allocated to each Category.