A budget is a spending ceiling you set for yourselves, and the system follows it on its own from actual expenses. Alongside it, another question often comes up: how much of our money is already promised to a project? The two are handled on different screens, and this page explains which.
Set a budget
- Open Finance, Budgets card.
- Click New budget.
- Choose the expense category (rent, maintenance, missions…), the amount and the period - a specific month, or the whole year.
Usage is computed automatically from the expenses actually recorded. A progress bar, then Watch and Over badges, warn you before the ceiling is crossed.
Tip: leave the category empty for a general budget - one overall ceiling, all expenses together. It is often the first budget a church sets, and it is enough for a long time.
Vote the budget, and freeze it
As long as the budget is not voted, it is a draft: everyone adjusts their envelopes. Once voted by the board or the assembly, it is frozen.
That is what gives the follow-up its meaning. You do not compare actuals with a plan rewritten mid-year to make it fit: a budget that follows spending measures nothing any more.
- Define all your envelopes first.
- In the Budgets card, click Vote the budget.
- Give the decision reference (minutes number, assembly date). It is optional, but it is what ties the figure to the act that authorised it.
Once voted, the New budget button and the pencils disappear: the amount no longer moves.
Revising a voted budget
Churches are alive, a budget may have to change. It is possible, but it is an act:
- Click Revise the budget.
- Write the reason (10 characters minimum). It stays attached to the decision, as in the minutes.
- Make your adjustments, then vote again.
Note: the revoked vote stays in the history. We do not rewrite the past, we complete it.
One question only, and that is deliberate
The form used to ask three questions: which category, which fund, which cash source - with a priority rule between them that nothing on screen explained. In practice, every budget created targeted a category, none a fund or a source. Two questions out of three only delayed the one that mattered.
A finance tool must be easier to use correctly than to use wrongly. The budget now asks one question.
Money promised to a project
A church often collects for a specific purpose: a building, a mission, a rent to cover. That money sits on the same account as the rest, but it is not freely available - and a board that ignores this can spend it elsewhere in good faith.
This is handled with campaigns, in Finance → Contributions. A campaign has a name, a target, a period, and every payment attaches to it. The system draws two things from that:
- the collection follow-up: how much has been raised, by whom, how far the target is;
- the restricted share of your net assets, visible in Accounting → Net assets, facing the unrestricted funds the board can really use.
Note: the "fund" concept was removed in July 2026. It duplicated campaigns - both described money promised to a project - with nothing on screen telling them apart. No data was lost, and the net assets statement now reads its restrictions from campaigns, which is where churches had actually recorded them.
Where the money leaves from: the source
Not to be confused with restriction. When you record an expense, you say which pocket it leaves: tithes, service offering, Sunday school offering, shop, ticketing, general fund. The system refuses to take out more than the pocket holds, and the Cash by source card shows what each has left.
Restriction says what the money is promised to. The source says where it leaves from. They answer different questions, and neither replaces the other.