You know the drill. You open last year’s operating statement, copy it into a new tab, tweak line items, and try to recall why insurance spiked or which expense you tied to CPI. The work is simple, but it is tedious and full of small choices that are easy to lose. The problem is not building a budget. It is building one you can defend. Every line needs a basis, a date, and a reason. Without that, the model holds up until someone asks a basic question and you have to retrace your steps. Underwriting ~5 min to run Build Annual Operating Budget Vic prompt Use Vic to build an operating budget from prior year financials and current rents. Purpose Delivers a complete, source-transparent operating budget in about five minutes instead of forty-five, ready for underwriting or planning use. Inputs Prior Year Financials Required Property Type Optional Rent Roll Optional Property Details Optional Budget Year Optional Known Cost Figures Optional Staffing Plan Optional Outputs An Excel workbook showing revenue to NOI, an editable inputs block, escalated expense lines labeled by basis and source date, insurance detail, management fee, reserves, and a sourcing summary that flags every assumption. Time saved Turns roughly forty five minutes of manual work into about five minutes. How it works You give Vic your prior year financials as the anchor. If you have a rent roll, include it so revenue starts from in place rents instead of a top line guess. You can also pass property type, budget year, property details, known costs, and a staffing plan. If some of that is missing, the task still runs, but more context leads to a tighter budget. Run it with: Use Vic to build an operating budget from prior year financials and current rents. Vic maps the operating statement into a standard chart of accounts and builds a forward year in Excel. Revenue starts with the current rent roll. Expenses do not move by a single blanket factor. Each line escalates with its own cost driver and a dated source, so utilities, payroll, repairs, and insurance move on different tracks. The management fee is a percent of revenue. Reserves follow norms for the property type you provide. The workbook comes back clean and ready to use. There is an inputs block you can edit without digging through formulas. The income statement runs from revenue to NOI. Expense lines show their escalation basis and source date, so you can see what changed and why. Insurance is broken out with detail instead of buried in a lump sum. Management fee and reserves calculate in place. Most teams skip sourcing. This task includes a sourcing summary that flags every assumption. If a line ties to a known cost, it is labeled. If it escalates from prior year, the driver and date are shown. That turns a static budget into something you can walk into a meeting and explain without backtracking. This takes a clear stance. Budgets should reflect how costs behave, not how fast you can update a spreadsheet. Treating every expense the same saves time early and creates problems later when the numbers do not hold up. Line specific escalation with a clear source fixes that without adding work. In practice, this is a five minute step at the front of underwriting or annual planning. You get a clean Excel file aligned to the property’s chart of accounts, with revenue built from the rent roll and expenses escalated in a way that matches reality. From there you can tweak assumptions, add capital items, or drop it into your model. If you have rebuilt the same budget three times for slightly different scenarios, this is where you stop. Start with a consistent, sourced base and spend your time on the decisions that matter.