Troubleshooting: Saving a Budget
Most budget saves complete without any issue, but a handful of error messages can appear when you click Save as draft , Save and activate , or Save changes . This article explains what each one means...
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Most budget saves complete without any issue, but a handful of error messages can appear when you click Save as draft, Save and activate, or Save changes. This article explains what each one means and reassures you about what does (and doesn't) get saved when something goes wrong.
"A budget named ... already exists for this fiscal year"
Every budget needs a unique name within its fiscal year. If the name you entered collides with an existing budget for that year, the name field shows an inline error and the save is stopped.
Fix: Change the Budget name field to something unique for that fiscal year, then save again.
"Somebody else changed this budget while you had it open"
Two people can have the same budget open. If the other person saves first, your save is refused rather than quietly overwriting their work, with: "Somebody else changed this budget while you had it open. Nothing was saved. Reload the page to see their changes, then make your edits again."
Fix: Reload the page. You will see their version. Re-apply your edits on top of it and save again. Nothing of yours was written, so there is no half-merged budget to untangle.
A close relative of this message is "Could not check whether this budget changed while you had it open. Nothing was saved. Try again." That one means the check itself did not complete. Nothing was saved either way, so simply try again.
"Fiscal year has not been configured"
If your property's fiscal year hasn't been set up in Accounting Settings, saving is blocked and a persistent banner appears at the top of the editor.
Fix: Click Configure fiscal year on the banner, complete the setup, then return and save.
"This budget is archived and can't be edited"
Archived budgets are read-only by design. If you somehow reach a save action on an archived budget (for example, an old browser tab), the save is rejected with this message.
Fix: There is nothing to fix here - archived budgets can't be edited. If you need to bring the plan back into active use, create a new budget or duplicate the archived one instead. See Archiving Budgets and the Archived Section.
A save error appears, what happened to my amounts?
Whatever the cause (a duplicate name, an unconfigured fiscal year, someone else's edit, a network problem, or an unexpected server error) URBI only shows a success message once the server has confirmed the save. The messages you can trust are "Budget saved as draft," "Budget changes saved," and "Budget activated." A red message means it did not go through, and your changes are still in the editor waiting for you.
This also means the app will never let you activate a budget with amounts that didn't actually save: if the save step inside an activation fails, activation stops right there and the budget stays in its previous status.
One honest detail about a failed save. A save is a short sequence of steps: the budget record, then the name, then each category in turn, then all of the account lines together. Each of those steps either completes or does nothing, so no single step can be half-written. But if the sequence fails part-way, the steps before it are already saved. In practice that means a failure can leave you with a renamed budget whose figures did not update, some categories saved and later ones not, or, on a brand-new budget, an empty draft in the list.
What to do: reload the editor before retrying. That way you are editing what is actually stored rather than what you thought was stored, and a second save writes the whole thing cleanly.
Reassurance: If you see a red error message instead of a green success message, your latest changes were not saved. They remain in the editor. Fix the issue described in the error and save again; you will not lose your work by trying again.
Still stuck?
If a save keeps failing after you've addressed the message shown, contact URBI at hello@myurbi.co with the budget name, fiscal year, and property so we can look into it.