Create or Edit your QuickBooks Budget in Excel

QuickBooks Training Post:

UPDATED 11/06/2016 with this video:

The purpose of this article is to walk you though the process of creating an initial budget in QuickBooks, exporting it to IIF, then editing it in Excel, and lastly importing it back into QuickBooks. Also it is important to point out this whole process as decribed here only works in the WINDOWS versions of QuickBooks: Pro, Premier, Accountant, and Enterprise.

Why do this if I can just create the entire budget in QuickBooks?
Well, most avid excel users feel that working the budget within Excel is much faster because of their ability to use formulas to project increases or decreases in the income and expense accounts.

So, therefore here are the steps

First you need to CREATE the Budget inside QuickBooks by going into the Company Menu and then Planning & Budgeting: Set Up Budgets
Secondly, follow the standard process to select the year and type of budget.
Then Export the budget as an IIF File, clicking on File, Unitizes Export, List to IIF Files…
You need to choose only, Budget as the check marked option to avoid confusion on the Excel file
The next part is a bit tricky, you must open Excel and then open the file in excel directly by going into the File, Open File option or Drag-and-drop the file into the excel spreadsheet, it will look like this:
Then replace all the Zeroes with the desired amount, please keep in mind that income accounts need to be in negative (since they are credits) and expense accounts in positive, after you are done just save the file… do not do “Save As”, simple just save.
Last step is to import the IIF file back into QuickBooks, by going into File, Utilities, Import, List from IIF… Then go back to the Set Up Budgets windows to see your imported budget.