Understanding Budget Patterns

When a group of accounts have budgets that follow a predictable pattern, budget pattern codes can be used to define the percentages for spreading annual budget amounts among periods. For each business year, you can use the Revise Seasonal Patterns program (P09001) to:

• Spread amounts equally across the number of periods.

• Create an unlimited number of seasonal pattern codes.

• Bypass spreading amounts.

This table describes the three budget patterns:

Budget Pattern	Description
Equal spread	If your revenues and expenses occur evenly through the fiscal year, you can spread the annual budget equally among the periods.
Seasonal pattern spread	If your revenues and expenses occur in a predictable pattern, you can set up seasonal pattern codes to describe each pattern. For each code, enter the percent of the total annual budget to be spread to each period.
No spread	If you do not want to spread an annual amount to periods for an account, you can bypass spreading amounts for that account.

The default budget pattern for the code blank evenly spreads an annual budget equally among periods; however you can change the instructions for the code blank.

You should assign the most common budget pattern the code of blank. For example, is your company rarely needs to spread an annual budget equally among the months, you can use the budget pattern code of blank to identify a seasonal pattern code that you frequently use, which speeds data entry of that code.

You do not have to define budget pattern codes if your company performs any of these tasks:

• Creates only annual budgets (no monthly budgets).

• Manually creates monthly budgets for all accounts.

• Creates annual budgets for all accounts with the annual amount being spread equally among the periods.