Dynamics NAV Budgets – the most under used feature?

Why is it that so few companies use the budgets feature in Dynamics NAV? It’s great, easy to use and flexible. But less than one in ten companies of any size tend to use it in my experience. Almost everyone complains that ‘I haven’t got round to setting it up yet’.

So quick tip – setting it up is one of the easiest things you can do in NAV. We can have it working for you in ten minutes flat. Don’t believe me? Your budgets will take longer to input than that? Well let me prove it.

Go into G/L Budgets on the General Ledger menu or use the search box. Select New tro create a new budget and give it any code and description you like. Then select Edit Budget.

And the first thing you should do is set the ‘View By’ to Month, rather than the default of Day, you don’t really want to do budget by day do you?

I then set the year I’m budgeting for in the date filter in the filter section at the bottom so it doesn’t default to the work date periods all the time.

Next filter it to just Income Statement (or Profit & Loss as we call them here in the UK) accounts

Then the fastest way to get a budget is to copy the figures from last year and apply a ‘factor’ or percentage variance. That done via the ‘Copy Budget’ option at the top.

Now there are some options here you need to get right so again I’ve highlighted them in yellow below

So the secret is this doesn’t just copy budgets, its copies G/L entries to Budgets using the Source and Selecting, yes, G/L Entry. Well don’t your budgets in Excel start with actuals from your chart of accounts now?

Set the G/L account range you want to budget for – again I’d suggest only your income/expenditure accounts.

Set the date range you want the actuals for, usually last year.

Make sure you select your new budget code against Copy To Budget Name.

Under the apply section I’ve uplifted all the numbers by 5% by multiplying by 1.05 and rounded to the nearest whole number with the rounding method.

I’ve done just one total for the month by setting Date Compression and most importantly I’ve set the Date Change Formula to ‘+1Y’.

Click OK, let it run and your budgets done.

Oddly you need to click Refresh when it returns to the budget before the new figures show.

And voila, you have a budget.

Next explore the Export to Excel option on toolbar, don’t forget to click Include Totalling Formulas. You can distribute, get people to revise it and then update it via the Import from Excel.

Then go and build a budget by Dimension, yes, the copy from G/L entry works by dimension as well!

So come on, no excuses are there? Do your budgets in your core business system not in that unmanageable rats nest of an Excel spreadsheet please.

Author: James Crowter

I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times. Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction. So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved. I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand. My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially. I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV. After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential. Follow me online via my other social channels: - Twitter: @jamescrowter - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.

3 thoughts on “Dynamics NAV Budgets – the most under used feature?”

  1. Thanks for the write up,most clients are not aware of the functionality. You can do a little customization to make it work for your amortized expenses like rents and dues by spreading the cost over some periods.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *