Starting a budget from last year
You no longer have to build next year's budget on a blank grid. URBI can pre-fill every line from what the property actually spent last year, or from the budget the board approved last year, and it...
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You no longer have to build next year's budget on a blank grid. URBI can pre-fill every line from what the property actually spent last year, or from the budget the board approved last year, and it remembers which one you chose.
This is available to property management staff, board members, and PMs who can manage budgets for the property. You must select one property. It does not appear in All Properties.
Choose how to start
- Select the property, then go to Accounting > Budgets.
- Select New budget and enter the fiscal year and a name.
- Pick one of the three ways to start.
The three starting points. Only the third one asks a follow-up question.
How do you want to start this budget?
Start from nothing
Every account starts at $0. Build the budget line by line.
Copy an existing budget
Duplicate any budget on file, draft or archived, as your starting point.
Start from last year
Pre-fill every line from last fiscal year, then choose which numbers to base it on.
Choose the baseline
Only Start from last year asks this. It is the question that decides what every percentage on the grid is measured against.
Pick the set of numbers the new budget is built on top of.
How should we set the baseline?
Prior fiscal year actuals
Every line pre-fills from what last year actually spent.
Reserve-fund spending is excluded, so this will not match a bank statement.
Prior ACTIVE budget
Every line pre-fills from the budget the board approved last year.
Prior fiscal year actuals answers "what did this really cost us". Prior ACTIVE budget answers "what did we say it would cost". Most managers building a defensible budget start from actuals, because that is the number an owner can check.
An option is greyed out when the data behind it does not exist: no posted activity last fiscal year, or no active budget last fiscal year.
Why reserve spending is left out
Reserve-fund spending is deliberately excluded from the actuals baseline. Reserve work is lumpy and non-recurring, so folding a roof replacement into an operating baseline would inflate next year's operating budget by an amount nobody intends to spend again. This is also why the actuals baseline will not tie out to a bank statement for the year.
What gets remembered
The choice is stored on every line, not just on the budget. The grid's Baseline column header names it, so anyone who opens the budget later can see what the numbers were measured against without asking you.
Copy an existing budget does not set a baseline. It gives you a starting set of numbers, not a comparison point, so the grid shows No baseline recorded instead of a percentage.