Budget Balance Duplication

Is this normal? Or a system error?

Under Finance, Prepare Annual Budget, Budget by Unit, if I put an amount there and if I receive donations in the same account, it duplicates the Budget Balance under the Budget Summary tab.

I put 1500 in as the Budget Assigned by Unit, for a church leader to use. Anticipating that the normally 500 budget will be supplemented by a $1000 fund raiser later in the year.
We had the fund raiser, collecting $1000.
$500 was spent from that account.

I should expect to see Budget balance of $1000 ($1500 less $500 expenses), but instead see a balance of $2000. ($1500 budget assigned by Unit + $1000 collected in the account, less the $500 expenses.)

It makes the feature useless and requires the need for external Budget tracking sheets.

Am I doing something wrong?

It sounds like you're thinking about budget in the wrong way. When you allocate a certain amount to a budget in the Prepare Annual Budget page, that is the amount coming from the budget allocation provided from church headquarters. You shouldn't include in that amount anything you expect to transfer into the account during the year. The annual budget page is designed to let you plan out how the budget allocation from the headquarters is divided up for the various uses.

Fundraisers for discretionary use by leaders are not allowed by policy. Only a single fundraiser is allowed per year and the money for the fundraiser can only be used for annual youth camps. I recommend that money from such a fundraiser is placed in the Youth Camp Registration category along with any payments from youth and families. This keeps all the incoming money that can only be used for camp in the same place.

It is true that the budget for camps generally has to be managed outside LCR. But for all other categories (where there shouldn't ever be any deposits) the LCR budget pages should work just fine.