Everything you need to know.
97 answers about building, sharing, tracking and exporting your budgets. Type a question in your own words.
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- Create your first budgetPick a template, give the budget a name and a job, and start filling in lines.
- Invite someone to a budgetInvite people by email as editors, section editors or viewers. They use their own free login.
- Lock the bid when it is awardedLocking freezes every bid value and saves a protected snapshot. Actuals, notes and the running budget stay editable.
- Purchase orders (POs)Raise POs for vendors, code each PO line to a budget line, issue a PDF, and use the invoice as the actual.
- Export a PDFDownload the bid as an AICP-format PDF: top sheet, notes and detail, on your letterhead.
- Import a Hot Budget fileChoose a saved Hot Budget job and it is rebuilt here: sections, lines, bid, running and every log.
- Your three free budgetsEvery workspace gets three budgets free, with every feature and no card. They stay editable even if you never subscribe.
- My sign-in code has not arrivedCheck spam, wait a minute, make sure the address is right, then send a new code.
Getting started
Signing up, signing in and your first budget.
Building a budget
Sections, lines, rates, fringes and the numbers behind them.
- Templates: start from AICP, blank or your own
- Sections A to X
- Add, include or remove a section
- Add, move, duplicate and delete lines
- Typing numbers, formulas and negatives
- Paste from Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Undo a change
- How a line is calculated
- Overtime and base hours
- Fringes (P & W)
- Production fee and insurance
- Handling, post markup, tax and talent fees
- Budget settings
- Currency and exchange rates
- Job information and the cover
- Bid notes
- Prefill rates and rate cards
- Change many lines at once
- Hide unused lines and find what needs attention
Bid, award and versions
Statuses, locking the bid, the running budget and snapshots.
Tracking actuals
Purchase orders, payroll, petty cash, overages and variance.
Workspace and team
Your company, its people, jobs and the budgets list.
- Workspaces, explained
- Add people to your workspace
- Owner, admin or member?
- Choose what members see
- Switch between companies
- Hand the workspace to someone else
- Leave a workspace
- Remove someone from your workspace
- Jobs: group budgets by production
- Find, pin and filter budgets
- Archive or delete a budget
- Company name and logo on PDFs
Export and import
PDFs, spreadsheets and bringing in Hot Budget files.
Plans and billing
Free budgets, the subscription, people and cancelling.
Account, privacy and security
Your login, your data and how it is kept.
Troubleshooting
When something is greyed out, missing or will not save.
- My sign-in code has not arrived
- My invitation link does not work
- Why can't I edit this?
- A line shows 0 even though it has a rate
- I can't change the budget's currency
- "This link is not active"
- "Changed by someone else while you were typing"
- "Connection lost"
- My Hot Budget file will not import
- The PDF export failed or looks wrong
- I can't create a new budget
Still stuck?
Write to hello@actualsbudget.com and a person will answer.