Importing Budgets: How to import an Association Budget

Vantaca makes it easy to create and maintain your Association's annual budget. To learn more about manipulating your budget inside  Vantaca, visit Budgets.

When starting a new Association, you will likely have an already prepared budget. In those cases, it is often easier to simply import that pre-existing budget. In this article, we will go over how to import budgets and provide a template file to use to make things easier. 

There are two different budget import formats:
Note: Template files are attached to the bottom of this article.

Budget

The Budget import will read the GL Account number on each row, the annual budget, and the monthly breakdown. This will add each row in the spreadsheet as a new Line Item on your Accounting > Budget page. You'll find the following Columns:

Year: The Fiscal year being imported. This is a required column for each row.

GLAccount: The GL Account Number for each line item. This must match a Used GL in the Association > GL Accounts page. 

Annual: The total Annual amount for that GL. If the income/expense is a regular recurring amount, then Vantaca will break up the Annual amount into 12 equal amounts after import. 

Jan-Dec: These columns will override if the Annual amount does not match; unless this is zero, in which case it will take the proposed annual amount and distribute evenly across the months; These Jan - Dec fields are not required if you are distributing equally across the 12 months.

Budget (New Association Only)

The New Association Budget import will still make a line item for each Row of the Spreadsheet, but will also make each GL Account Used on the Association > GL Accounts page, and update and override the Description of those GLs to match the Description column. 

Note: Both GL Account and Description are required fields in this import. 

Import Process

Once your file is in the correct format, Navigate to Settings > Import. From the Imports tab,  click New Import and choose either Budget or Budget (New Association) from the dropdown menu. Select the Association, Fund, and file. 

If you did not use the attached Template file, you may have column headers that do not match what Vantaca is looking for. Any unmatched columns that do not fit one of the required columns will be highlighted red and also displayed in the error message column to the far left on the spreadsheet.

This can be corrected by going to the Unmatched tab and matching the incorrect column with the corresponding required column header. You can ignore the Error Message field on that tab as it will also be "resolved" when clearing the actual error.

Once all columns are matched, the import can be committed.

REMINDER: The GLDescription column is only used on the Budget (New Association Only) import.

Best Practices

• Perform one import for each individual fund;
• Use "Replace" if importing for next year so that it doesn’t duplicate lines from what has been predictive.