Mobile Power — Budget Management Walkthrough

Version: 1.0 Date: March 2026 Prepared by: Advance Insight Client: Mobile Power Flow: Creating and managing monthly department budgets

Budget Management Walkthrough

This walkthrough guides you through the monthly department budgeting process in Mobile Power's Odoo system. You will learn how to create a budget, add budget lines with accounts and amounts, break lines into details, and refresh actuals from analytic entries.

1Navigate to Budgets

Open the Accounting module and go to Journal Entries > Budgets Month. You will see the list of existing budgets, filtered by the current year by default.

The list shows the budget name (period + department), the budgeted total, actual total, and the remaining balance.

2Create a New Budget

Click New to create a new budget. You need to fill in:

• Period — Select the month from the date range dropdown
• Department — Choose the department (analytic account marked as a budget department)
• Company — Auto-filled based on your current company

3Add Budget Lines

In the Budget Lines tab, click Add a line to add accounts to the budget. For each line, select:

• Account — The expense account (e.g. "Travel Expenses", "Office Supplies")
• Amount — The budgeted amount for this account in this period

The amount column shows the total budget per account. If a line has details (see next step), the amount becomes read-only and is computed from the details.

4Add Budget Line Details

Click on a budget line to open its detail form. Here you can break down the budget into specific items with:

• Description — What the budget item is for
• Unit Cost — Cost per unit
• Personnel — Number of people
• Quantity — Number of units

The line Amount is automatically calculated as Unit Cost x Personnel x Quantity.

5Update Actuals

Once a budget is set up, click the Update Actuals button in the header to refresh the actual amounts. This pulls data from analytic entries matching the budget's department, period, and accounts.

After updating, each budget line shows:

• Actual — The total actual spend from analytic entries
• Balance — Budget minus Actual (positive = under budget, negative = over budget)

6Review Budget Lines (Pivot View)

For a cross-departmental overview, navigate to Journal Entries > Budget Lines and switch to the Pivot view. This shows budgets broken down by department and account across periods.

You can group by department, account, or period to compare budget allocations and actuals across the organisation.