About managing multiple budgets
You can have up to 999 budgets for a given activity group or activity. This lets you maintain multiple concurrent budgets for comparisons, which is helpful when you need to track budget revisions.
When you budget at the activity/account category level, use the same budget number consistently across all activities. For example, Moose Wood Outfitters uses budget 100 as the active budget in their new store projects. They create budgets in each activity such as DESIGN, FRAMING, ELECTRICAL, etc. using budget 100 and they designate budget 100 as the active budget. This lets them compare activity actual amounts and units to the current budget in each activity (budget 100) when they run budget variance reports for all activities.
The application does not enforce any sort of budget numbering methodology, but using a consistent approach makes it easier to preserve multiple budget revisions. You can maintain current activity budgets in the active budget, and copy revisions to different budget numbers, which are inactive.
Example
Moose Wood Outfitters uses budget 100 as the active budget. At the start of the project, they defined a budget for each activity using budget 100. When the first budget revision occurred, they copied budget 100 to budget 101, then made their revisions in budget 100. When the next budget revisions occurred, they copied budget 100 to budget 102, and made revisions again in budget 100.
This preserves the original budget in budget 101, the first budget revision in budget 102, etc. You can track all budget iterations during the life of the project, so you can make budget-to-budget and budget-to-actual comparisons at any time. Also, no other maintenance is needed to identify the current budget, since the latest budget is maintained in the current budget, which is always flagged as the active budget.