Budget Check

You should also notice on the apportionments tab there are a couple of cells in use just below the table. One says ‘Check’. If all has gone well, the cell next to it should be filled with ‘£ -‘ meaning Zero (0). This is an incredibly important but often overlooked part of a budget matrix. It’s a short, simple check to make sure that your formulas worked and something didn’t go wrong.

Essentially it is a basic subtraction formula. Taking the total of the tenant’s annual charges, away from the total budget on the first tab. The two should equal exactly the same amount and if they don’t something is wrong.

More than likely if something is wrong it will be because the total percentage of the tenant’s apportionments do not equal 100%. This will cause either a shortfall or an over collection in the tenant charges in relation to the total budget you have set. You can test this out by purposefully choosing percentages for each property that will make the total more or less than 100%. This will give you a very clear picture of the impact a defective lease can have!

If your percentages total 100% and you are still getting a budget check error then I am afraid there will be a formula wrong in your tables somewhere. There’s no easy way to find those, you’ll have to check each one individually. A common culprit is not using Absolute cell references. You may have just dragged a formula down across cells instead.