With the budget in place (see the previous quick set up guide), it is important that regular monitoring takes place between what was estimated (budget) and what has actually happened. To access this worksheet, from the Menu select Budget and then Budget Monitoring.

There is some guidance on the worksheet, rows 6 to 26.

If you wish to download the spreadsheet that this guide is referring to you can do so by clicking here.

The only action that is required from the bookkeeper here is to select which Quarter the report is needed for. In cell C32, a drop down is available for each of the four quarters.

By changing this you will notice that the values in the three documents on the worksheet change, see the example below with Q1 and Q2:

Something the eagle eyed amongst you will notice is there doesn’t seem to be many entries in the ‘Actual to date’ column, only £1,000 in Grants and £125 in Rent – this information is coming from the information we entered earlier with ‘New Receipt’ and ‘New Payment’. As you use this spreadsheet to record your actual income and expenditure the Monitoring Budget worksheet pulls all of this information together to provide a detailed picture of where your charity sits.

Drawing your attention to the colouring used in column F. From an income perspective, Red means you had budgeted to have more by now than what has actually been received and Green means you have received more than you had budgeted. From a payment perspective, the opposite is true. Green indicates less money has been spent than what had been budget and Red indicates that more has been spent than budget.