Yes. The CU*BASE Budget tool is designed to set the base budget by using the historical record-keeping features of its General Ledger. Through the comparison of historical budgets and actual financial activity, CU*BASE can project a detailed budget in a single pass. Once your Budget is created, you can then use the Finanical Report Configuration to bring in your budget totals to perform your analysis.

The CU*BASE Budget tools are not intended to project your entire balance sheet. While some software products do that, that was never our intent. Our purpose in modeling select assets and liabilities is to create a projection to be used to calculate the income and expense for the budget. It results in a few simple things: You can create reports to present how you see member balances growing in the future. You can create reports to present the actual member balance in comparison to your project  More...

Yes. As long as you’ve set up your Budget Groups carefully, the modeling steps (Steps 5-8) can be done before, after, or simultaneously with the classical budgeting steps (Steps 9-10). Use your Budget Groups to help you stay organized and keep careful track of which G/Ls are being worked in each step. You’ll also need to coordinate any adjustments to your Budget Controls to make sure the proper G/L types are opened or closed at the appropriate times.

Yes, this is possible in most cases, at least for the monthly balances that are used by most budgeting tools and trending dashboards. Since importing detailed history of debits and credits to G/L accounts might not be possible, keep in mind that functionality may still be limited for some tools. Contact Keegan Daniel, VP Professional Services, at kdaniel@cuanswers.com to discuss your options for either flooding data into your database or manually entering data that could be used by the budget to  More...

When it comes to filling in your budget worksheet, it’s important to understand the distinction between the classical budgeting calculation (% increase or decrease based on previous year figures), versus how the modeling projections are determined: With the classical budgeting tools, CU*BASE calculates individual branch G/L figures, one month at a time, using previous year data, then shows you the total of those figures on the screen – it does not figure a total then spread it among   More...

Yes. We call that the “classical” budgeting method and you can do this without using any of the modeling tools if you like. You’ll still need to do steps 1 2 to configure your chart of accounts, then proceed directly to step 9 and budget all of your income and expenses using the same technique, using as many passes as needed for different calculation parameters.

You can use a third party tool to work your asset and liability projects and the associated income and expenses. Just remember that you can only upload the income and expense figures into your budget. The upload tool does not support uploading resulting balances for asset and liability G/Ls.

Yes. There is a technique for reviewing and manually adjusting branch allocation calculations for projected asset and liability balances. See the Budgeting with CU*BASE booklet for instructions. NOTE: The classical budgeting tools also contain a “Close a branch” function which zeros out monthly figures from your budget starting with a month you specify. But this does not affect projections for asset and liability balances used in the modeling tools.

Yes! With the 16.12 release we added a feature that allows you to take a snapshot of your entire budget at any time and store it in a new warehouse file, separate from where your “live” budget is stored. This lets you store several versions of your budget – such as both a conservative and aggressive budget using different calculation assumptions. You can use archived snapshot(s) in the Variance Analysis dashboard to compare your actual performance against multiple archived budg  More...

General Ledger changes for CU*Check21- Phase II In CU*BASE, launch Tool #202 Chart of Accounts/Budget Groups Maint Enter a Corp ID and a Branch # Change the outside Check Deposit Branch # to a unique G/L account for that branch Repeat to set up a separate general ledger # for each branch office (740.00 – 745.00 range) – do not duplicate G/L numbers

Yes, you can use the modeling tools to project balances on other income-producing assets (such as investment income) or liabilities with associated expneses (such as an OTB mortgage product). For details refer to the Budgeting with CU*BASE booklet.