Budgets and forecasting

Set monthly budget lines by account or project and track budget-versus-actual as the year unfolds.

What budgeting in Qontab is

A budget in Qontab is a plan for the year expressed in the same language as your books: a monthly target amount for each chart-of-accounts account you choose to steer. As the year unfolds, Qontab compares that plan to what you actually posted — account by account, month by month — so you can see exactly where you’re ahead, behind or on track. It turns the ledger into a forward-looking management tool instead of a backward-looking record.

You don’t budget every account — only the ones that matter to the decision at hand: revenue, payroll, marketing, rent, professional fees. Anything you leave blank simply doesn’t appear in the comparison.

How budgets are built

A budget is a named container tied to a fiscal year. Inside it live budget lines, and each line is one cell of a grid: an account, a month (1–12) and a planned amount. Budget a single account across the whole year and you have twelve lines for it; budget five accounts and you fill in as many of their monthly cells as you need.

• Per account — lines are keyed to your chart of accounts, so a budget speaks in the exact accounts your P&L already uses.
• Per month — a separate planned figure for each of the twelve months, so seasonality is built in rather than averaged away.
• Editable any time — lines are upserted, so re-saving an account/month simply overwrites the previous figure; nothing is duplicated.
• One or many budgets — keep a conservative and an ambitious version side by side, or a fresh budget per fiscal year.

Budget vs actual

The point of a budget is the comparison. You pick a date range and Qontab builds a budget-versus-actual report rolled up by account:

• Budget — the sum of the planned amounts for the months that fall in the range.
• Actual — the net of the base-currency debits and credits posted to that account in the range. Only posted entries count, so drafts never distort the picture.
• Variance — actual minus budget — plus a variance percentage, for every account and for the total at the foot of the report.

Because actuals are taken in your base currency, a budget reads cleanly even when the underlying transactions were in several currencies — the stored exchange rates have already done the conversion.

Step by step

1. Create a budget and give it a name, tied to the fiscal year you’re planning.
2. For each account you want to steer, enter a planned amount per month. Re-saving a month overwrites it, so you can revise as plans firm up.
3. Run budget vs actual for a date range — a month, a quarter, the year to date.
4. Read the variance and percentage per account, then act: trim an overspend, chase the revenue line that’s behind, or revise the plan if the assumptions changed.

Budgets with AI (MCP)

Through the Qontab MCP connector an AI assistant can build and interrogate budgets in plain language. The budget tools are Enterprise-tier over MCP: list_budgets and get_budget read your plans, create_budget and update_budget manage the container, upsert_budget_lines writes the monthly figures, delete_budget removes one, and get_budget_vs_actual returns the same account-level comparison you’d read on screen — ready for the assistant to summarise.

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