QuickBooks Online Budgeting Limitations: 5 Common Complaints and What to Do Instead

QuickBooks Online's budgeting is fine for a simple budget. It runs out when your budget isn't built the way your chart of accounts is, or when you want more than one comparison on the page. Here are the five places people hit the wall, what you can do inside QuickBooks, and where a different approach fits.

Budgeting in QuickBooks Online is available on the Plus and Advanced plans. You create a budget, enter an amount for each account for each month, and run the Budget vs Actuals report. If your budget has one line per account, you review one period at a time, and you don't need to compare against anything else, that's all you need, and you should stay with it.

Most of the frustration starts when a real budget meets that design. These are the five limits that come up again and again.

1. Budgets have to follow your chart of accounts, account by account

A QuickBooks budget is an amount against each account. Finance teams rarely think that way. A board wants to see Trade spend, Logistics and Marketing, and each of those is booked across several accounts. The built-in report can only compare a budgeted account with that same account's actual balance, so a budget built by category doesn't line up.

Inside QuickBooks: restructure the chart of accounts to match the budget, or keep the category roll-up in a spreadsheet and rebuild it every close. Both work. Both are ongoing maintenance.

With DrillFi: you define your own budget lines and map accounts to them once. Many accounts can roll up into one line, and each account rolls into exactly one line. Nothing changes in your chart of accounts, and new accounts don't break the comparison.

2. Getting the budget in is fiddly

If you build budgets in Excel, you have to translate them into QuickBooks' format. Intuit's import starts from a template built from your chart of accounts, and its instructions say not to add columns or rows for extra accounts, so every account you want to budget has to exist before you download it. Intuit also tells you to confirm your fiscal-year start in settings before you begin, and you choose the fiscal year during the import. It's still a spreadsheet exercise: unique account names, amounts in the right cells, and a check of the result account by account afterwards.

Inside QuickBooks: prepare the file carefully (unique account names, fiscal-year start confirmed first, a fresh template each time, amounts only), then spot-check the result. If it's still wrong, enter the budget by hand.

With DrillFi: you upload an Excel file of your own budget lines with monthly amounts, and you pick the fiscal year when you upload. There's nothing to import into QuickBooks, so there's no QuickBooks template to match.

3. Versions: you can keep several budgets, but you can't easily work with them

QuickBooks Online lets you keep more than one budget and has a Duplicate action in the budget list, which is handy for starting a revised version. The friction is in using them. The Budget vs Actuals report compares your actuals with one budget at a time, so putting an original and a revised budget next to each other is a job for a spreadsheet.

Inside QuickBooks: name each budget clearly, duplicate it when you revise, and keep the comparison of versions in Excel.

With DrillFi: each company can hold named budget and forecast versions. You can upload a new one without disturbing the live one, choose which is active, rename or delete old ones, and download any version to Excel, edit it and upload it again.

4. No forecast next to the budget and the actuals

The usual monthly question isn't only "how are we doing against budget?" It's "how are we doing against the budget and against where we now think the year will land?" The Budget vs Actuals report is budget against actual. A reforecast, such as actuals so far plus an updated outlook for the remaining months, is a different thing, and most teams build it in a spreadsheet.

Inside QuickBooks: export actuals and rebuild the forecast and comparison in Excel each month.

With DrillFi: upload your reforecast as a forecast version and switch the comparison between budget, forecast and last year. You can show them side by side on the same lines. DrillFi doesn't build the forecast for you. You bring the numbers, usually from the Excel model you already trust.

5. Limited comparative periods

It's hard to get a budget, a prior year and a full-year view in one place. Budget vs Actuals compares a budget with actuals for the period you run it, so putting last year next to them usually means running separate reports and combining them in Excel. Intuit's own community answers say that comparing year-to-date actuals with the whole annual budget is limited to viewing it by period, so a month, year-to-date and annual view together takes extra work. We cover the workarounds in this post.

Inside QuickBooks: run the reports separately and combine them with lookups.

With DrillFi: compare against budget, forecast or last year at any level, with variance in dollars and percent against whichever comparison you pick, for the period you choose. Turn on the full-year budget and Budget left to see how much of the year's budget remains next to year to date.

At a glance

What this adds up to

None of these is a bug. QuickBooks Online's budgeting is designed around one budget, one set of accounts and one comparison. The trouble starts when the way your business plans is different, and the cost shows up as a spreadsheet you rebuild every month. The fix is either to bend your plan to the software or to put a layer between the two that understands your plan. DrillFi is that layer.

QuickBooks menus, report behavior and plan features change over time, and this post describes them as of its publish date. Check each point against your version. Intuit and QuickBooks are registered trademarks of Intuit Inc. Used with permission. DrillFi is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit.