Budgeting overview

The Lawson Budgeting application enables you to create budgets based on factors, historical activity or budgets, seasonal trends, projected growth, or inflation rates. You also can allocate an annual or quarterly budget. For example, you can allocate an annual utility budget to the locations or departments in a company based on the space they occupy.

Think of the Budgeting application as a large database file; you do not have to categorize or manipulate data before entry. You can directly define data in a file by organizing it in a particular company, accounting unit and account, budget number, and fiscal year.

These are the different ways you can use the Budgeting application to store budgets or other statistical amounts or units:

• Base the current year budget on historical activity or budgets

• Build inflation rates or salary increases into budgets

• Determine seasonal fluctuations in sales and payroll

• Forecast budgets, plan projects, or evaluate performance

• Store calculated ratio values for reporting

• Store statistical balances used to calculate other budgets or used in reports

• Store units and amounts in the same budget

• Create different versions of the same budget

• Use global factors or rates to help calculate amount budgets

• Compare two budgets or two versions of the same budget

These concepts provide background and conceptual information for the procedures within this chapter: