In Aplos, you can create a budget for your fiscal year, which defaults to 12 months. In some scenarios, you may need to enter your budget for more than just a 12 month period. In this resource, we will go over how to accomplish a multi-year budget and how to view this multi-year budget on your reports. 

To learn more about using the budgeting module, check out this resource.

Creating your Budget

If you have a program, fund, project, or any other item that spans more than 12 months, you'll need to create budgets within 12-month fiscal year terms. However, you can adjust the Reports section to review longer periods.

Suppose you have a program running from January 2025 to December 2026 (24 months) and you're using a calendar fiscal year (January - December). You would follow the below steps to create your multi-year budget

• Enter Budget for 2025: In Aplos' budgeting screen, start by entering the budget for 2025.
• Enable Multi-Year Budgeting: At the top of the screen, check the "Three Year Budget" box. This will reveal fields for 2026 and 2027.
• Enter Budget for Additional Years: Now, you can enter the budgeted values for each income/expense account for each year.

This allows you to manage budgets that span multiple years, while still working within the 12-month fiscal year structure in Aplos.

Multi-Year Budget Reporting          

To run a report showing both actuals and budget for a program across multiple years, follow these steps:

• Go to the Reports section and select the Budget to Actual report.
• Change the date range to "Custom" and enter the start and end dates you need.
• Click Apply to refresh the data.
• The report will now display the actual and budget totals for both fiscal years in one combined report.