What is a Plan
In Budget Forward, a Plan encompasses your Accounts, Budgets and Goals.
By creating the concept of an overall plan, Budget Forward allows you to easily make a duplicate to experiment with new ideas of how to manage your money. Additionaly, you may even use more than one plan so you can keep your family, business and personal goals seperate.
You can also share plans with other users of Budget Forward.
The Budget Period is the length time simulated to produce the budget rings. Your budget rings are a representation of this simulation. Usually this is set to a single year as many people find their expenses recur at least once per year. However if you have Budget Items that have a recurrence where they do not occur every year (eg. every two years on the first week of November) then you may wish to set this to a higher value.