This guide walks you through creating an operational budget – your property's planned revenue and expenses for the year – using the Operational Budgets 2.0 page. You can either copy an existing budget or start fresh from a template.

First, ensure that your Accounting Periods for the time period you are budgeting are Active. This can be done from the Accounting Periods page.

1. Navigate to Accounting, then Operational Budgets 2.0. You open on the Budget tab by default, which lists the official budgets for every property you have permission to see.

2. Find the property you want to budget for. If its budget hasn't been started, you'll see a green Start button; if it has, you'll see a green View button.

3. Click Start to open the Create Budget pop-up.

The Create Budget pop-up offers two options on the left side: Copy Previous and Import / Start from Scratch.

Copy an existing budget, forecast, or actual data to use as your starting point. Best when the new budget is similar to a prior period or you want to build on historical data.

1. Select Copy Previous from the left panel.

2. Choose the Property you want to copy from (defaults to your current property).

3. Select the Type of data to copy: Budget, Forecast, or Actual.

4. Choose the Year to copy the data from.

5. Optional: add a bulk adjustment to increase or decrease all expenses or revenue by a set percentage.

Use a template to import values, or build the budget from zero in Inn-Flow. Ideal when you have budget data prepared in a spreadsheet or prefer working in Excel.

1. Select Import / Start from Scratch from the left panel.

2. Select which Chart of Accounts (COA) – the individual general-ledger accounts – you want to budget for. Each department is an accordion with a checkbox; deselect a department to exclude it, or expand it and select or deselect individual accounts.

After selecting your accounts, choose one of two paths:

• Click Create Budget at the bottom to start your budget from zero, or

• Click Next to Step 2 in the top right to download a template.

If you go to Step 2 to use the template:

1. Download the template.

2. Read the instructions included in the download.

3. Fill out the template.

4. Upload the completed file into Inn-Flow.

5. Click Import Budget in the bottom right.