How do I make an 18 month budget

Hello, @houstonwb-elswor. 

I'm here to assist with creating an 18-month budget for your organization in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

In QBO Plus and Advanced, you can create a profit and loss budget to track income and expenses, and a balance sheet budget to track your financial position. I suggest creating one for profit and loss budget.

1. Go to the Gear icon and choose Budgeting.
2. Select Create a budget then select your preferred options for the budget plan.
3. Click on Next.
4. Select Monthly in the budget sheet. 
5. Toggle on Compare reference data to compare actuals from your previous expenses and your planned budget.
6. Name the budget and fill in other details, then hit Save and close.
7. Since the period covers 12 months, repeat the process of creating a second budget to cover the six months, leaving blank the budget amounts for the remaining months.

Next, to account to the cyclic patterns of your organization and project through the cash low point, you can use QBO's Cash flow planner in identifying regular fluctuations in financial data that occur over time and use the planner as a forecasting tool in making necessary preparations and adjustments in your budget plan. Here's how you can do this: 

1. Go to Dashboards, then select Planner.
2. Select Add item.
3. Select Money in if the item is income, or Money out if it's an expense.
4. Give the item a name, description, and enter an amount.
5. When you're done, select Save.

To learn more about using the cash flow planner, let me add this article as a guide: Use the cash flow planner in QuickBooks Online. 

Moreover, as a future guide, I'm adding this reference on customizing your reports to emphasize information that matters to you the most and get valuable insights for your business: Customize reports in QuickBooks Online.

If you need further assistance creating a budget and project through the cash low point in QBO, we're always here in the Community to help. Take care.

Here is a basic outline of how to do this:

1) Verify you have QB Plus or Advanced. Budgeting is only available in one of those versions.

2) Click on Financial Planning ➡️ Budgets

3) Click Create Budget

4) QuickBooks as an option to import a budget. This is what you want to do. 

4.1 - You are going to download the template . 

4.2 - Then you are going to to the budget in Excel. This is going to allow you to put together a budget through either a traditional approach (calls to departments, etc.) or a data science approach (predictive models) in order to capture the cyclical nature of your business. 

4.3 - To do 18 months, you are going to input information for the 12 months of the first year and the 6 months of the next year. 

5) As mentioned in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5crjyrTEOEQ , once you create a budget, there should be an option to compare Budget against Actuals. 

Hope this helps.

Best,

Ralph Brooks

PS: I have a finance and a data science background. Happy to help anyone who has additional questions on this. My email is [email address removed] .