Setting up budgets
Budgets help you to manage your spending on projects and departments, with reporting and validation checks to help keep track of and control your spending.
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Creating a budget financial calendar
Go to Administration > Budgets
The financial calendar allows you to set up the period the budget needs to cover. You must have a financial period set up to create your budgets.
When you set up a financial calendar you need to specify the year and the period. You can have more than one period in each financial year to help with your reporting.
To create a budget period click on the ‘Add a new budget period’ button.
Enter the year and a name for the period. Enter a start and end date for the period. You should make sure that as you create more financial periods the end dates match with the start dates for the next period so there are no gaps. The system will warn you if the dates do not match up.
When you are happy, click Save.
Creating a budget
Budgets are created for specific financial years. From the administration area click on Budget details. This will bring you to the Budget admin area and there will be a list of any budgets already created, along with the details of the budget.
Budgets are defined by the codes you select to represent them. These are shown in the coding column, separated by forward slashes. When you create a budget you will be able to select the code combination which defines it.
Click on the ‘Add a new budget’ button.
Select a description for the budget, this will be used to identify it on screen and inside reports.
Select the financial year the budget will be used in.
The next fields are the coding types that are active on your system (so you may have more or less than shown above and you may have chosen different names). Click in the field and a drop-down list of the available codes will appear, or you can use the magnifying glass to open a search.
Select the relevant codes to define your budget. You don’t have to select something in every field, you could, for example, just choose a cost centre and a collection leaving the other fields blank.
Enter the value of the budget. This is the total allocated to spend during the chosen financial year.
You can then choose how to manage budget overspend. No limit means nothing happens if the budget is exceeded, though this will be shown. You could also choose to impose advisory or hard limits. Advisory will warn when a transaction will exceed the budget, hard will prevent a transaction being entered if the budget would be exceeded.
If you choose to apply an advisory or hard limit you will additionally have the option of applying an advisory threshold. This threshold will warn when budget expenditure is nearing the allocation for the financial year and is entered as an actual value.
Check you have completed all the necessary fields to define your budget.
Once done, click save and your budget will become active. Any claims or invoices with the coding combination you chose (in the same financial year) will be set against the budget.
Dashboard budget view
If you are a budget administrator then you will see a summary of the condition of your budgets on your dashboard.
For each budget, there is information on the percentage used and the graph is colour coded to make it clear if the budget has overspent or is coming close to its limit.
Report views for budget analysis
These can be accessed from the left-hand menu. Click to open report views then click to expand the Budget analysis
Budget details will give you a breakdown of all expenditures against each budget including dates, claimant, the reason for spending etc.
Budget usage gives a summary showing how much of each budget has been used to date.
Report views allow you to add your own custom filters, groups and sort orders.