Budgeting
You can create a budget from a template, narrow the list by category and country to find the one your funder expects, and check the settings that shape everything you enter afterwards.
A template supplies the category and group structure so you start from a shape rather than a blank grid.
**A template carries the structure a submitted budget is expected to arrive in.** If the form you have to submit against is in the catalogue, take it — its structure is the structure that will be read, which is why picking the right one at the start is worth more than any restructuring you can do afterwards.
In the budget window, open the budget dropdown at the top left and choose **Manage Budgets**.
Click **New Budget**, then give it a **Budget Name**.
A brand-new project has no budget yet, so opening it puts this dialog in front of you immediately — there is nothing to click through first. See [open a project](/kb/article/open-a-project).
Two dropdowns sit above the template list.
- **Category** — one entry for each category the published catalogue currently offers (*Feature Film*, *Documentary*, *Series*, *Short Film*, *Commercial*), plus **Custom Budgets** for your own loaded and saved templates. A template that suits several categories appears under each of them. KOSMA remembers your choice for the rest of the session. - **Country** — **All**, plus every country the templates in the catalogue are filed under, as the code the catalogue publishes: `AT`, `CH`, `DE`, `SE`. **`INT` is international** — a template that is not tied to one country. Switching to Custom Budgets resets Country to All, because your own templates never carry one.
**Start with the country you are funding in.** Nothing in the list tells you which territory a row belongs to — the Country column was replaced by this dropdown — so picking your country first is what turns a catalogue into a shortlist of two or three.
Each row shows a **Template** name, an **Info** note, and the template's **language** under an icon in the header instead of a text label — point at the icon to see what it is. All three sort, and the list opens unsorted, in the order the catalogue publishes. **No Template** stays first whichever way you sort.
A row from the online catalogue carries a small icon beside its name. Point at it: it reads **Downloaded** once the template's file has been fetched to this machine, or **Online — not yet downloaded** before you have picked it for the first time.
**If nothing in the list fits your territory, try `INT` before you give up on the catalogue** — an international template is tied to no one country and may still be closer to the production than a blank grid.
**No Template** creates an empty budget. It is the right choice when none of them resembles the production at all — but building the structure by hand is real work, and a budget in nobody's format is one you will rebuild before you can submit it.
**Load File** (top right of the dialog) takes a template someone sent you as a file. A file that is not a KOSMA template, or is a template for another module, is rejected with a message saying which. A file you load lands under Custom Budgets, selected, so you see it immediately.
Loaded and saved templates in **Custom Budgets** are yours to manage right in the list: double-click the name to rename it, edit its Info or Language cell directly, or use the trash icon to delete it. Templates from the catalogue are read-only — their metadata is curated and must not drift from what the catalogue says.
Click **Ok**. If the template you picked was converted from an Excel spreadsheet, a one-time notice appears first — **Template Converted from Excel** — asking you to verify that rates (fringes, supplements, effects and so on) are still current before you proceed. It does not appear for **No Template** or for your own Custom Budgets templates, since neither was touched by that conversion. Acknowledge it and the budget opens.
Two things touch every row you are about to enter:
- **The [default currency](/kb/article/set-currencies-and-the-reporting-currency)** — what the budget reports in. - **The category and group structure.** Treat it as the form it is: the accounts you add belong *inside* the shape the template gave you. Renaming or reordering the template's own groups makes your budget harder for the body that published it to read, and easier to bounce. Where the production genuinely has something the template does not, add it — and do that before there are accounts to move around.
**Next.** [Add groups and accounts](/kb/article/add-groups-and-accounts) to start filling it in.
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