How to Import a Budget from Excel into QuickBooks Online (Without the Headaches)

Budgeting in QuickBooks Online doesn’t have to mean re-typing numbers line by line or wrestling with formatting errors.

If you already build your budget in Excel (and most people do), QuickBooks Online gives you a way to import it directly as long as you use the right template and follow a few key steps.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to import a budget from Excel into QuickBooks Online, what options you’ll see along the way, and a few important things to watch out for so your budget imports cleanly the first time.

Where to Find Budgets in QuickBooks Online

Start by opening your QuickBooks Online file and clicking the gear icon in the top right.

Under Tools, select Budgeting.

Before importing anything, I always recommend clicking Create budget first. This lets you see the options available and ensures you’re setting the budget up correctly from the start.

Choosing the Right Budget Settings

QuickBooks Online allows you to create budgets for:

• Profit and Loss (Income Statement)
• Balance Sheet
  

Most small businesses start with a Profit and Loss budget, but both options are available depending on your needs.

Next, you’ll choose:

• The fiscal year for the budget
• Whether the budget is consolidated or subdivided
  

If your file has customers, classes, or locations turned on, you may see options to subdivide the budget. In my sample file, the only available option was customers, but in other files you may also budget by classes or locations.

QuickBooks also gives you the option to create a budget using actuals from a prior period. This can be helpful if you want last year’s numbers to serve as a starting point but for this walkthrough, we’re importing from Excel instead.

Always Download the Budget Template First

When you reach the import screen, you’ll see two options:

• Upload a budget
• Download the budget template
  

Whenever QuickBooks gives you a template, use it.

The template is formatted exactly the way QuickBooks expects, which dramatically reduces the chances of import errors.

Once downloaded, you’ll notice:

• Instructions on the first tab
• A consolidated budget layout on the next tab
• Column A listing Profit and Loss accounts
• Columns for January through December where you enter your budgeted amounts

Preparing Your Budget in Excel

Enter your budget numbers directly into the monthly columns.

In my example, I only entered figures for part of the year because the sample company only had data for six months. One important thing to note: QuickBooks still expects all months to exist, even if some months are blank. You can’t import only half a year without including the other months.

Once your numbers are entered and reviewed, save the file somewhere easy to find.

Importing the Budget into QuickBooks Online

Back in QuickBooks Online, choose Upload budget, select your Excel file, and click Next.

If everything is formatted correctly, QuickBooks will confirm that the budget has been created successfully.

At this point, you can click View budget to review the imported numbers and confirm they match your spreadsheet.

A Quick Note About Fiscal Years

You may notice that in some cases, especially when working in a sample company or trying to import a budget for a past period, QuickBooks may assign the budget to a different fiscal year than expected.

This isn’t something you’ll usually run into in a live business file, but it’s worth double-checking so you know exactly which year your budget is attached to.

What Comes Next?

Once your budget is imported, you can use it for:

• Comparing actual results to budgeted amounts
• Running budget vs. actual reports
• Financial analysis and planning
  

I’ll be using this same budget in a follow-up video to walk through financial statement analysis, so you can see how it fits into the bigger picture.

Importing a budget from Excel into QuickBooks Online is straightforward when you:

• Use the provided template
• Choose the correct budget settings
• Include all months, even if some are blank
  

If you already budget in Excel, this approach saves time and keeps your numbers consistent between tools.

If you have questions about budget imports, or something looks different in your file, leave a comment aschances are, your question will help someone else too.

And if you’d like more practical, real-world QuickBooks Online tips like this, be sure to check out the video and subscribe for future walkthroughs.

Helpful Resources

Compare Quickbooks Plans: https://www.mycloudbookkeeping.org/quickbooks-plan-comparison

Small Business Month-End Checklist: https://learn.mycloudbookkeeping.org/small-business-month-end-checklist

Cheers,

Kerry

‍

This video shows you how to import a budget from Excel into QuickBooks Online, using the budget template and avoiding common import issues.
I’m Kerry from My Cloud Bookkeeping.”

 So here we are in the sample company in QuickBooks Online. We pop up here to the gear icon

and you can see under tools you can select budgeting.

Now we are going to import the budget, but before we do that, I wanna pop into create budget so you can see what some of the options are. You can see that you have the option to create a budget for your profit and loss or for your balance sheet. We then wanna select the period that we wanna create the budget for, and then we choose either consolidated or subdivided.

We can subdivide our budget by customers, classes, or locations in this file. The only option that we have is customers.

We create a budget by customer. If we were looking to say, do some sort of a, a large project that we wanted to budget something where perhaps we were doing a large job for one of our customers that we wanted to prepare a budget for, for classes or locations. Check up the videos about classes and locations.

They're not turned on in this file, but there is the ability to also do separate budgets for each of your sales divisions or your, um, different locations. And this is where you would select that option. You also have the option to create the budget using actuals from prior periods. So as you could just see here, we could choose a prior year.

We could choose, uh, some accruals for the current year. We can choose some actuals for the current year, and then that would be the form, the basis of our budget. But we're going to import.

So here we are once again selecting those same options, but this time for importing, we wanna do it for create the budget for the fiscal year 2025. Might sound a little odd, but I need it for another video that I'm creating. And then we wanna click next, and then we wanna click next,

and then we wanna click next.

Now here is where you had the option to either upload the budget or download that budget template, and whenever you have an option to download a template, I suggest that you do that because that will ensure that all of your information is in the format that QuickBooks needs. So here is the downloaded file.

It has some instructions on that first page, and then here we have our consolidated budget. And you can see column A reflects our income statement, the profit and loss. And in these January to December months is where we enter the numbers that we would like to import for our budgeted income statement.

In the style of Martha Stewart, here's one I prepared earlier. Uh, I'm only doing a budget for a six month period because using this sample company, there are only numbers to compare to for the six month period. So I've typed numbers in, as you can see, all the way down to net income here. And these are the numbers I'm going to import and we'll have a look next to the actuals.

So click upload budget.

I'll select the file that I, I just created.

And click next. And you can see budget has been created successfully and we have the option to view the budget. You can see here it has brought in all of our numbers from June to December exactly as were included in my spreadsheet, and then it's given us a total in that first column. Full disclosure, I did actually have to go back and put columns in for those months with nothing in there.

So if you're trying to do this at home, you can't just import half a year

you may notice that this has come in as a fiscal year 2026 when I actually wanted 2025. I don't know why this has happened. It's could be 'cause it's a sample company or maybe it's because I'm trying to budget in the past, which I agree is a little unusual. As I mentioned earlier, I'll be using this file for some analysis that I'm creating another video on.

Now let’s look at report (on another video – I made a mess!)

That’s how to import a budget from Excel into QuickBooks Online using the budget template.
I’ll be using this same budget in a follow-up video to look at financial statement analysis.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and if you’d like more QuickBooks Online tips like this, be sure to like and subscribe. I’ll see you in the next video — cheers.