Budgets & goals

Goals and budgets both answer the same question — is the business doing what you planned? — at two very different levels of detail. Both live in the sidebar under Planning.

Goals

A goal is one target number, tracked automatically against what your books actually record. Goals are included on every plan, Free included.

Go to Planning → Goals and create a goal. You choose:

• Type — what the number measures:
  • Revenue Target — income recorded in the window.
  • Expense Budget — total spending kept under a ceiling.
  • Profit Target — income minus expenses.
  • Client Acquisition — new clients added.
  • Invoice Collection — income collected.
  • Category Budget — spending in one category kept under a ceiling.
• Period — weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, or custom — plus the start and end dates.
• Target value — the number itself.

PulseBooks then tracks the goal from your recorded transactions. Each goal shows a progress bar and a projection at your current pace: whether you are on track, at risk, or off track, the projected outcome, the amount remaining, and the time left. Direction matters — for a revenue or profit target, faster is better; for an expense or category budget, spending slower than the clock is what "on track" means.

Goals can be edited or deleted at any time.

Budgets

Budgets are a Pro and Business feature — see Plans & billing.

A budget is a grid of your income and expense categories across the months it covers. Go to Planning → Budgets and click New budget: give it a name and a starting month, and it covers twelve months by default.

Fill in the monthly figures by hand, or start from something real:

• Copy from actuals fills the grid from what your books actually recorded — by default the same months one year earlier. The actuals are read on the accrual basis, and anything that could not be mapped to a category is reported to you rather than silently dropped.
• Copy previous year rolls another budget's plan forward with a percentage uplift — 5 for +5%, 0 for a straight copy, a negative number for a cut.

A budget starts life as a draft. Mark it active when it is agreed, and archive it when its year is done — a finished year's budget is what the variance report is computed against, so archiving keeps it rather than deleting it.

If you later downgrade below Pro, budgets you built stay readable (and can still be archived); creating and editing them needs a paid plan again.

Budget vs Actual

The payoff for building a budget is the Budget vs Actual report at /reports/budget-vs-actual (Pro and Business): pick a budget, a date range and a basis, and it lays actual figures beside budgeted ones for every category, with the variance in amount and percent, totalled per section. See Reports.

Goals or budgets?

Use a goal when one number is the point — "collect 500,000 this year". Use a budget when you want to plan the whole year category by category and then hold the books to it month by month. They work fine together: a profit target as the headline, a budget as the working plan.