I migrated my circa 2018 feed bot sheet to the Foundations Template a few days ago and I´m still cleaning up data. I didn’t realize at the time that I was missing budget columns and sheets (I also was missing the Accounts sheet, but cured that with a Labs add-on that added the Accounts sheet).
My Categories sheet does not have any budget columns. Nor do I have a Monthly Budget Sheet and Yearly Budget Sheet (per the FAQ which states which sheets come with the base Foundation Template.
I’m not sure how to proceed to get the budget columns. I’m not a very deeply involved budgeter; the facilities in the original feed bot sheet were sufficient, although it appears from examples that one can have multiple years of budgeting.
Doing some research, I see that I ended up with the “Simple” Categories sheet that does not support budgeting, even though the Foundations Template is supposed to include “Monthly Budgeting”.
So, I renamed the Categories sheet and installed the “Monthly Budgeting” Solution. Voila! I have budget columns. I then copied the category values from the renamed sheet and replaced the default values. So far so good.
I’m actually in the process of migrating from my Feed Bot sheet, so I wanted to copy over the budget from it, which was actually for 2020. I followed the directions I found under the Foundation Template FAQ that listed how to do multi-year budgeting. I created twelve new columns, but instead of putting them to the right of the 2021 columns, I put them to the left. I copied the budget amounts from the Feed Bot sheet. Now, most things budget are working, except that the Monthly Budget won’t show ANY budget amounts from 2020. It will show actuals.
Renaming the Categories sheet and installing the Monthly Budget solution was a good idea. That should have added a viable Categories WITH BUDGET sheet into your spreadsheet, @kent.madsen.
I wouldn’t have guessed that the column order matters but what happens if you setup your Categories sheet in a more standard way… like this?
Thanks Randy, and you’re right, I’m getting close. My sheet looks like your example. When I installed the Solution, it installed the columns for 2021. So, I added columns to the LEFT of 2021 to make space for 12 2020 columns. Yes, i entered the first one as 1/1/2020 and then copied the formula from the 2021 columns.
Update – I installed the “Yearly Budget” solution and it does see 2020 budget amounts, so it seems there may be a bug in the “Monthly Budget” which doesn’t see 2020. Maybe it won’t see budgets for years before the current year?
With Yearly Budget working, I probably don’t need Monthly Budget anyway.
If you’re up for a little more experimentation, @kent.madsen, now that you’ve fixed your Categories sheet, I’d try restoring the Monthly Budget then restoring the Yearly Budget (in that order) (for the reason here).
