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Just playing with the free trial now, and I'm stunned to see I have to calculate my overall budget in a spreadsheet and then import it separately. How has this been flagged for so long without any action? What's the point of software if you have to do everything in Excel alongside it? Unclear what value Xero adds here.

This is a must. The overall budget should automatically be calculated with the figures entered into each tracking category (department) to show an overall view of the budget

A basic feature essential for financial management of any business.Clients are extremely surprised when they learn the Xero does not have it. Its like working with an arm cut off.

It is for this reason I cannot recommend Xero to clients with multiple departments.

That will teach me for assuming Xero did the basic of accounting and budgeting processes better than others... I'm unsure how this has been on the radar for 10 years and not yet been introduced.
Hopefully the forums can help me now understand how other organisations/businesses operate without the ability to use departmental 'sub-budgets' in Xero and still track performance against budget on a monthly basis. Back to excel we go...

I've recently transitioned from QuickBooks to Xero when changing accountants and I can't believe that Xero hasn't built-out this vital functionality - QuickBooks is far superior in this respect.

And then to see that this was first reported in Jan 2013 (10 years ago!) and still hasn't been under review, let alone built is shocking.

As others have noted before me, this functionality unlocks the full potential of having budgets per category, which essentially form sub-budgets that could feed into the master budget which combines all (or a specific set of) budgets across your chosen categories.

This also alleviates the need for double-keying changes on a specific budget for a given category, and then having to manually make the same change
on your master budgets(s) - which also presents increased risk of fat finger errors.

On a related, there should also be a default report template that allows you to compare monthly budget variance across a 12-month period i.e. a calendar year. As far as I can tell, there is no default template for this and so you have to build this out manually. Again, more manual work and another area where QuickBooks is superior...

Ability to use the Overall Budget / new budget with the tracking category so that Xero adds up the tracking categories. Currently you have to manually calculate the total in eg excel and import. I haven't found an app that does this. Fathom charges per category for budgets which is too expensive.

I don't see the point in having tracking categories and nothing to compare them with. It would reduce the amount of manual work needed to produce reports as well

Please get this sorted and enable consolidation. It is very critical.

This would be logical and reduce need to input overall budget

We don't use Xero budgets for this very reason. Currently if we update a budget at category/job level we would then be required to manually update the budget at an organisation level. So we still keep our budgets in excel - I imagine that this feature would be needed across many organisations and would a real selling feature around increased productivity.

This would be extremely helpful

Reporting - Budgets by tracking category to integrate with master overall budget

I would have thought this a basic requirement for any budgeting & reporting system

Very important feature required.

So needed and thought it would be an easy to add option

Surprised that such a basic function not there already.

This would be extremely useful I am having to do all separate budgets and an overall budget manually at the moment

This makes complete sense to me and would save time - any readjustments would then automatically flow through to the master overall budget.

I have been requesting this feature for a number of years now and have even spoken to Xero development team about some ideas in how to implement

Yes, I would find this to be a very helpful function.