The Charter Support Unit recently released a new “Budget Projection Tool” which allows schools to take their Budget Versus Actual reports from the last five years, and project out a new budget for the next five years.
To help schools understand how to use this tool we conducted a webinar on November 18, 2021, the recording of which can be found here: https://charter.support/webinar/budget_projection/
Below are a series of three videos we created to help you walk through the use of the tool.
Exporting Data from QuickBooks
This video walks you through how to export a budget versus actual report from QuickBooks Enterprise. It demonstrates an export using both an Excel format and a CSV format and the differences between them.
If you use an accounting program other than QuickBooks, you should be able to find a “Budget versus Actual” report which does a similar thing. The key is to export the data so that you have two columns for each month, one which lists the actual expenditures and the other which lists the budget for that month.
Converting BvA To Projection Tool
Using the Conversion Tool
This video will walk you through how to use the “BvA Conversion Tool” which converts the reports from your accounting system, to the format required by the projection tool. The important part of this process is to normalize your account codes so that it follows a specific format used by the projection tool, and so that it is in alignment with the Florida Red Book accounting codes.
Projecting The Budget For The Future
Using the Budget Projection Template
This video will walk you through how to past the results from the conversion tool into the projection tool, and how to go through each tab of the budget to answer questions in order to project our your budget for the next five years.