Drafting a Budget from Your Books
Write next year’s budget from your own history and, for rental owners, from the leases that will pay rent — every line with the reason for its number. A draft until you adopt it.
Budget drafting writes a year’s budget for you to review. Choose the year, what it is based on (last year’s actual figures, or an average), how much income and expenses should grow, and how the year is spread across months. For a landlord or a management company, rent can come from the rent roll — the leases that will actually be paying that year, less the vacancy you expect.
Every line says where its number came from
Each line carries its reason in words — “2025’s $13,786 plus 3%” or “Rent roll: 12 leases, less 5% vacancy” — so the budget can be explained to an owner, a lender or a board. You can override a single account with a percentage, a fixed amount, or leave it out.
The draft is arithmetic over your ledger and your leases, not a guess: the same choices always produce the same budget, and nothing is invented. An account with fewer than six months of history is spread evenly across the year and says so, because a seasonal pattern from two invoices is noise.
Draft, then adopt
A drafted budget is saved as a draft. It becomes your budget — the one reports compare against — only when you adopt it. Budgets you had already saved are unaffected.
Related features and guides
- Your Renter Profile: Fill It In Once, Share It When You Apply — Documentation. Write your work, income, rental history and pets once, attach the documents owners usually ask for, and share it with the homes you apply to — only if you turn sharing on. Owners see notes about how each file was made; so do you.
- Rent and housing payments from Seayora in your books — Documentation. Post the rent your residents pay through Seayora, and the housing-agency payments you record, to your own Seayora books automatically — what posts, to which accounts, and what happens when a payment comes back.
- The Tax Center for Landlords and Management Companies — Documentation. Your Schedule E by property, what the rentals add to your federal tax, owners’ year-end statements and 1099-MISCs, your 1099s and every deadline — from the records already in Seayora.
- Landlord Bookkeeping and Tax Prep: Get Organized Before April — Guide. How landlords can keep rental income and expenses organized all year, track deductible costs, and walk into tax season with clean records.
- Bank Feeds & Reconciliation — Feature. Connect bank feeds and reconcile transactions against the ledger, so what the books say and what the bank says actually match.
- Invoicing, Estimates & Statements — Feature. Create invoices and estimates, send customer statements, and collect payment through the same rails as rent — with everything posting to the ledger automatically.