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Quickbooks File Repair — How to Create a Budget for 2010, using nine months of Data fro 2009

This is a how-to for building a QuickBooks budget for one year from partial actuals of the prior year -- specifically, creating a 2010 budget from January 1 through September 30, 2009 figures when the budget wizard insists on pulling only the earlier year's actuals. It's a workflow limitation, not a file error.

What the situation is

QuickBooks' Create Budget wizard offers to populate a new budget from a prior year's actual revenue and expenses. The catch many users hit is that the wizard pulls the actuals from the year before the one they want -- so a budget created for 2010 imports 2008 figures rather than the nine months of 2009 data you actually want to base it on.

Why it happens

  • The wizard derives "prior year actuals" relative to the budget year and the system clock.
  • Because of that relative logic, a budget for the upcoming year reaches back further than expected.
  • Only completed/closed periods feed cleanly into the import, which limits partial-year ranges.

What you can safely try first

  • Temporarily change the computer's system date to 2010, then run the budget wizard so it pulls the 2009 balances instead of 2008.
  • Set the system date back to the correct date as soon as the budget is created.
  • As an alternative, create the budget from scratch and key in the nine months of 2009 actuals manually from a Profit & Loss report for that range.
  • Confirm you're on the latest maintenance release of your QuickBooks version, which can change wizard behavior.

When professional help is the safer path

Budget-building itself is a setup task, but it depends on having complete, undamaged history to draw from. If your reports won't total correctly, your Profit & Loss looks wrong, or QuickBooks throws errors when you pull the 2009 figures, the company file may carry data damage. Our engineers can open the .QBW file, repair the underlying records, and return clean data your budget can rely on. The work is done in-house in North America, and our no-data-no-charge policy means there is no cost if the data cannot be recovered.

Learn about our QuickBooks data recovery service, or start a recovery if your file needs repair first.