How to Use Budget Roll-Ups
One of the great things about MonkeyPod is the ability to have a near real-time connection between spending and budgets. From basic budgets to budget roll ups, being able to track your actuals against your budgeted amounts makes life a lot easier.
Want to learn how to make a budget before you learn a roll-up? Check out this article for an Overview of Budgets
What is a budget roll-up?
A budget roll-up lets you combine multiple related budgets into a single, high-level view. This makes it easy to manage detailed budgets for individual activities or programs while still being able to see a budget that encompasses the bigger picture. For example, a performing arts organization might create a separate budget for each production during the year, then roll those budgets up into one annual budget that shows the combined performance budget for the year.
A word of caution about overlapping timeframes
Before you get started, it’s important to understand a key nuance of budget roll-ups. Because multiple budgets are combined into a single rolled-up view, it is possible for the same income or expense to appear in more than one budget included in the roll-up.
Rollups always include budgets with the same scope, so the biggest risk is with overlapping time frames. If one budget in the rollup starts before another one ends, you can easily end up with transactions in that overlapping period that would be counted twice in your rollup report. Be vigilant about your start and end dates to avoid this sort of problem.
How do I create a budget roll-up?
To create a budget roll-up select Create Budget Roll-up from the Finance menu.
From here you are prompted to give your roll-up a name, a scope, and to select the individual budgets that are part of this roll-up.
And that's it! you've created your first roll-up! This will "roll-up" any budgets selected into one budget! That combined budget can be filtered by date range, and viewed with or without actual amounts just like regular budgets in your MonkeyPod. To learn more about working with budgets, see the Overview of Budgets article.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do budget roll-ups include pledges?
Yes, they do!