Budget In Brief

Install

Budget In Brief is a small and powerful application that asks for basic information to produce budget documents. It is created to give you the flexibility to create multiple budget documents in seconds, from files that you have already collected from many parties during budget preparation.

Try Samples and Tutorials

Look though our collection of samples and tutorials. You will find very detailed hands-on explanations of features and the different ways you can use them. You can make changes yourself, add headers and footers, reset page numbers, create new cover pages, explore and learn.

Create budget book

Create a budget.book file and describe what sections should be in your budget document and how they should be organized. You can create many budget.book documents and use that same information to produce multiple different documents like; Adopted Budget, Strategic Plan, Fee Schedules, which might interchange narratives, reports, media content or other shared information.  

Run application and Get your budget document 

Launch Budget In Brief application, enter required the parameters, choose your desired file format: Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word, and click the Create Document button.

Check the output folder, which you have supplied previously. Review the resulting document, make changes and rerun the Budget In Brief application to get your updated budget document. It is that simple!

Organize your budget data

Over the years you have probably collected many separate budget documents, you store them in a certain way on your computer so that you can quickly find and access all related information. Keep it that way, you are on the right track. We have never seen any Budget Analysts who were not organized. But, we have seen several different ways to organize their information. With our tool we give you the flexibility to store your files in any way.   

Give us feedback 

We love the idea behind Budget In Brief and we want you to be a happy user, one who stays in control of your Budget. If you have any complaints or ideas, please take a minute to post them on our Forums. Your feedback will eventually help other users to better enjoy Budget In Brief.

"I am running late for a meeting, how can I add watermarks?"

This tutorial will talk you through the following:

• How to add watermarks
• Default watermarks for the book
• Watermarks and bibc.exe console tool

Let's get started

For this tutorial we have used the Step 7 files.

The key for adding the watermark to your documents is to deliver an extra background message to your audience; for instance DRAFT, or CONFIDENTIAL, or FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY, or one of the many in common usage today.  

Budget In Brief application makes it easy:  

1. Enter the watermark you need
2. Select the document output format 
3. Click on the Generate button 
4. You are done! 

Figure 1

Open the document with the watermarks.

Figure 2

Default Watermarks

Starting with version 1.4.699.388 (BETA). In addition to specifying a watermark manually, user can specify a default watermark for a book. 

Open the book "Step7a.book" file in the notepad and update the specified watermark parameter, in our example we use "Draft - Revision B" watermark.

<BookName="City of Dallas Texas Budget In Brief"
      Value=""
      Version="1.0"
      StyleTemplate=""
      Watermark="Draft - Revision B">
  <SectionName="Main Document Section"
           TopMargin="1"BottomMargin="1"RightMargin="1"LeftMargin="1"
           FooterPath="Templates\Footer - Page Numbers.docx">

When you are done editing the book file.

1. Open the "Step7a.book" file in the Budget In Brief application
2. Check that watermark is loaded

Figure 3

3. Click "Create Document" button.
4. Open the result document with the watermarks.

Figure 4

Default Watermarks and Command Line Tool BIBC.EXE

The true benefit of the default watermarks opens when you use the Command Line Tool bibc.exe to generate you books. In this case you might specify the default value with revision specific or other related watermark text.

To continue with example we will assume a few things: 

• first, that you have downloaded the "Budget In Brief application with Command Line Tools" and installed it in to the "C:\Tools\BudgetInBrief " folder; 
• second that Step 7 tutorial located in the "S:\Step 7" folder.

Start command prompt and run the following command

C:\Tools\BudgetInBrief\bibc.exe "S:\Step 7" "S:\Step 7\Step7a.book"

Figure 5

Go to the "S:\Step 7\Draft" folded

Open the result document with the watermarks
 

Thank you again

Big thank you to the City of Dallas Texas! You can find the original City of Dallas Texas - 2003 Budget In Brief document in the Originals folder, in our case it is "S:\Step 1\Originals". You may also visit the City of Dallas budget page at this URL: http://www.dallascityhall.com/Budget/adopted_0203.html