A G/L budget is a named set of expected amounts entered per G/L account and period; it posts nothing and is used only for comparison with actual figures.
A G/L budget in Business Central is a named collection of expected amounts recorded against G/L accounts, usually by month and optionally by dimension. Budget entries never touch the general ledger, so they change no balance and appear in no ledger entry list. You can keep several budgets side by side, for example an original plan and a revised forecast, and compare each of them with actuals in reporting.
Press Alt+Q and search for G/L Budgets to see the list of budget names. Opening a budget shows a matrix where amounts are entered per account and period, and the individual amounts can also be reviewed as a list of budget entries. Budget figures are then displayed next to actuals through a column definition in a financial report.
In budget BUDGET-2026 you enter CHF 4,000 per month on account 6300 Marketing for January to December 2026, with the Department dimension set to SALES from July onwards. In March the actual spend on that account is CHF 5,150. A financial report whose column definition shows net change next to budget then reports a variance of CHF 1,150 for the month and a year to date variance that carries forward.
Amounts are often entered on a heading or a total account instead of a posting account, so they never line up with actuals. Sign confusion is the second trap: income accounts carry credit balances, and a revenue budget typed as a positive number shows with the opposite sign of the actual figures. Excel imports also cause silent damage when the budget name in the file does not match an existing one, because a second budget is created rather than the intended one being updated.
Budgeting by dimension only works if the same dimension actually reaches the postings. Before you spread a budget across departments, confirm that default dimensions are set on the relevant G/L accounts, vendors and customers, otherwise the comparison puts every actual amount under a blank dimension value and the variance columns look meaningless.
No. Budget entries are stored separately and never post to the general ledger, so balances, trial balance and VAT figures are unaffected.
Yes. Budgets are identified by name, so an original and a revised budget can exist for the same year and be compared separately against actuals.
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