Budgeting

The Budgeting tab lets you create monthly or quarterly fiscal year budgets, enter planned amounts by account, and compare actuals against your budget in a variance report.

To create a budget:
1. Go to Accounting → Budgeting
2. Click "+ New Budget"
3. Enter a name (e.g. "FY 2026 Budget"), fiscal year, and period type (Monthly or Quarterly)
4. Click "Create"

Import existing budgets (one or many):
Click "Import budget" to upload budgets you already have — your own, or your management company's — as PDF or Excel files. You can drop several files at once to bring in multiple years in a single step (e.g. FY2019, FY2020, FY2021). Turtini reads each file, detects its fiscal year, and shows a review row per file with an editable fiscal year, an editable budget name, and a revenue/expense/net summary. Fix anything that looks off, then click "Import" to import them all together. If a file can't be read it is flagged on its own row and skipped — the rest still import. Nothing is ever overwritten: every budget you upload is kept and filed under its year. If a year already has a budget, the new one is imported as an additional copy that sits alongside it — rename it (e.g. "FY2022 (management company)") to tell them apart.

Entering budget amounts:
Click the budget to expand it. The spreadsheet grid shows every active revenue and expense account as rows, with your chosen periods as columns. Click any cell to enter a dollar amount. Amounts save automatically when you click away.

Browse by year:
Because every budget is kept and filed under its fiscal year, the Budgeting tab has a year stepper at the top. Use the left/right chevrons to step through the years, or tap a year in the pill row to jump straight to it — the board can watch the numbers change year over year. When a year holds more than one budget (for example an imported copy next to the native one), a picker lets you choose which budget to view. The most recent year is selected by default.

Variance Report:
Switch to "Variance Report" view to see budgeted vs. actual amounts side-by-side, calculated from posted journal entries for each period. Favorable and unfavorable variances are highlighted.

Approving a budget:
Click "Approve" to lock the budget. Approved budgets cannot have their line amounts changed. Use "Copy From…" to seed a new budget from an existing one, with an optional scale factor (e.g. 1.05 for a 5% increase).

You can have multiple budgets per fiscal year (e.g. an original budget and a revised forecast).

Auto-draft from prior-year actuals:
Most orgs build next year's budget by rolling forward last year's numbers and bumping each line for inflation. The "Auto-draft" button (or asking Wally "draft next year's budget") does this in one shot — see the linked article on auto-budget for the inflation-aware mechanics.