Budgeting
You can copy a budget to explore a variant, and you know what the copy inherits and what it does not.
Copying is how you explore a change without risking the budget you have agreed — a version without the second unit, a version at the reduced schedule.
From **Manage Budgets**, duplicate the budget. Give the copy a **Budget Name** and a **Comment** saying what it is for; the default name simply appends *(copy)*, which stops being informative the second time.
**Also copy dependent datasets from other modules** copies the cash-flow, financing and cost-control datasets that hang off this budget along with it.
- **Tick it** when the variant needs to be costed through — a schedule change moves the cash flow too. - **Leave it** when you only want to try numbers in the budget itself. Fewer datasets is less to keep straight.
The copy is a full, independent budget. Editing it never touches the original.
One inheritance is worth knowing because it surprises people: the copy **keeps the original's frozen baseline**. Its Original column still holds the values from when the *first* budget was baselined, not from when the copy was made. So a copy shows variance against the original plan, not against itself.
That is usually what you want, since the question is normally how far the variant has moved from the approved budget. To make the copy its own starting point, [re-baseline it](/kb/article/compare-original-and-variance).
Open **Project ▸ Compare Budgets** in the original or the copy. Pick the other one from **Select budget to compare**, and every group and account lines up in one tree: its number, description and total from this budget, then the same three from the one you picked, and the **Deviation** between them. **Expand All** / **Collapse All** open or close the whole tree at once; **Show/Hide No./Description** trims the row labels down to just the totals when you want more room for numbers. Clicking a row's open control jumps straight to that account or group in the budget behind it.
Within a single budget, Original and Variance are still the built-in comparison against the frozen baseline — Compare Budgets is for comparing two separate budgets against each other.
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