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The Organized Wedding Consultant Online Help: Working with Budgets

Views Discussed: Initial Budget (under Default Client Info); Budget Overview, Budget Details, Payments (under Budgets & Vendors)

("Working with Budgets" is closely tied to the help article "Working with Vendors", so this discussion assumes you've already read "Working with Vendors".)

The place to start with budgets is "Initial Budget" under "Default Client Info" in the left-hand menu. The window may look confusing at first because it's designed to handle budgets for gay and lesbian weddings as well as traditional straight weddings. If you plan only traditional weddings, just uncheck "Gay" and "Lesbian" on the right hand-side of the window, and the whole window will become much simpler. You can always check them again to see the columns later if you want.

The "Initial Budget" shows the way that new clients' budgets are automatically distributed whenever you add a new client. We'll describe how to change the distribution on a client-by-client basis later, but what matters now is that the "Initial Budget" gives you the same starting place, in terms of percentages, for every new client. When you first install the program, the numbers in this area are based on U.S. national averages. However, this is the place to set up the percentages you prefer. In fact, you'll almost certainly want to change these numbers: we've started the percentage for "wedding consultant" at 0%, because we don't know what you charge! Once you enter your percentage, you'll need to adjust the other percentages downward to get a total of 100%. You can also add new categories, delete existing categories, and otherwise rearrange things to reflect your personal system of organization. Any adjustments you make to the initial budget will automatically take effect on any new clients you add, and they'll immediately affect the categories in the vendor index, but they won't have any effect on clients that already exist -- the software won't reset budgets you may already have tailored to suit you!

Note: The example vendors that come with the program (in the Vendor Index) are based on the original categories, so we recommend you hold off on completely rearranging the initial budget until you're comfortable with how vendors and budgets work together in the software.

Once you understand the "Initial Budget", go ahead and add a client (in the "Clients & Events" section of the left-hand menu), and create a database for that client (See "Working with Clients" if you haven't done this before). Then go to "Budget Overview" under "Budget & Vendors" in the left-hand menu, and you'll see the effects of the initial budget: whatever budget you assigned to the client in "Clients & Events" is automatically distributed using the percentages you assigned in "Initial Budget". The initial budget, however, is just a starting place -- once you've created a client and gone to "Budget Overview", you can tailor a particular client's budget in any way you'd like.

In addition to changing the numbers, you can add, remove, and rename categories. If you'd like to work with the budget in terms of adjusting the percentages instead of changing the absolute amounts, just click "Adjust the Percentages" on the right. If you'd like to keep the relative percentages of the categories the same but need to change the grand total at any point, there's a button on the right for that as well.

At this point, you've seen how "Budget Overview" works, and you've also seen how "Vendor List" and "Vendor Comparison" work (as described in "Working with Vendors"). "Budget Details", which is next in the left-hand menu, brings the three of them together so that you can assign vendors and other expenses to categories in the budget. It's also the main place where you'll monitor your spending as things progress.

The first thing to use in "Budget Details" is the button labeled "Pick Vendors and Projects to Include/Exclude" on the right-hand side. This button shows you all the vendors in the "Vendor List" for the client, broken down into the categories in the budget. By checking and unchecking the vendors in the list, you can quickly bring vendors into the budget and take them back out, allowing you to see the effects on the bottom line of various combinations. If you need to include multiple vendors in one category to meet your client's needs, just check multiple vendors in that category.

Vendors, however, are not the be-all and end-all of managing the budget: you can also use the buttons on the right-hand side of "Budget Details" to add projects (things like decorating, in cases where the labor is provided by volunteers but for which you still need to account for the cost of materials) and miscellaneous spending (for all the little things that don't even count as projects). With projects and miscellaneous spending, you have all of the sophistication of the vendor section at your disposal, but you also have quick and easy ways of tracking other expenses, as well.

While the "Budget Details" view is focused on "how much" and "for what", the next view in the left-hand menu ("Payments") is focused on "how much" and "when". The "Payments" view brings together all of the payment schedules for all of the vendors that you've included in the budget, plus all of the spending for projects and miscellaneous, in one place. All upcoming payments are listed by due date at the top, so you can stay on top of the payments without having to check the individual payment lists for a dozen different vendors! Always make sure that any vendors with whom you or your client signs contracts get checked as "included in the budget" -- otherwise, the software thinks they're just "what-ifs", and their payments won't show up in the list.

Payments turn yellow in the list shortly before they're due, and they would turn red if they were actually to become late. You can change what counts as "due soon" (yellow) by clicking "Payment List Options" in the lower right so that you can be sure you have enough lead time to get things paid on time.