Budgets are one of the most powerful control tools for any business of any size. The ultimate budget would be one that could model down to physical transactions to the same resolution as your actuals.

This spreadsheet does just that. Create base data such as sales and purchase invoices by associate (customer or supplier respectively) then apply a series of profiles, parameters and terms to them. Apply similar rules for payroll costs down to individual as per your choice. Also create cash book transaction for non Sales or Purchase ledger transactions.  Then run the transaction generator to create all your future transactions which will then be used to create debtor receipts, customer payments, payroll associated payments, periodic VAT receipts or payments, fixed asset depreciation journals as well as reversing prepayment and accruals and other journals.

The generated transactions adhere to the double entry principles and therefore you have a rich transactional ledger of budget items. Reporting dimensions also include nominal account, project and organisational codes; freely configurable and available at any transaction level. A profit and loss and balance sheet is available covering upto five years and is also available by project. The balance sheet of course provides you with credibility not least with visibility over the resultant bank balances. The ledger can also be exported if you wish to further analyse in another tool of your choosing.

The ease and speed at which this is done is remarkable. One of the most notable aspects of this model is that it no longer relies upon calculation hungry formula for its reporting. Your source base data is used to generate transactions so the reports are based on those. Comparing actuals with budgets is finally on a like for like basis.