Easily create, manage, and track budgets tailored to your specific needs. Stay within limits, manage expenses or any other expenditure, and make informed financial decisions. With real-time updates, Budgets empowers you to optimize your resources and achieve your financial goals.
How to start using Budgets
The permission to Manage Budgets is enabled by default for admins, allowing them to create and manage budgets.
To enable the functionality
- In Settings, go to Permissions
- Create a permission group or select an existing one
- Click on Finance
- Enable the permission Manage finance budgets
- Save
To set up budget owners
When creating a budget, users with the permission Manage Budgets, can designate owners. These owners have exclusive access to view and manage the budgets they own, ensuring they cannot access budgets they are not associated with.
How to create new budgets
Only users with the Manage Budgets permission can access the Budgets section and create budgets.
- On your sidebar, navigate to Spending → Budgets
- On the top, click on + New budget
- Set the basic information such as:
- Legal entity: this defines the currency of the budget, but users from any Legal Entity can report expenditures for it.
- Title: this helps you to identify the budget.
- Description: this is optional and allows you to add any extra information.
- Access: define who will be the owner of the budget. By default, it will be the creator, but you can modify and add there any user of the company. They will be able to see, manage, and edit all the budget info.
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Limits:
- Start date: by default, the creation date will be set, but you can easily modify it if you need to delay the budget launch.
- End date: this is an optional field, useful for defining when the budget ends and preventing further expenditure reporting by users.
- Time frame: it could be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually
- Limit: define an amount for each period.
- Employees: select the employees who can use the budget. You can skip this step and do it later on.
How to add records
All employees within the budget can select them when adding a new record in Expenses.
Soon, it will also be available for Purchase requests, Software, and Training.
- When creating a new record, select a budget from the list
Some important points to consider:
- Only the budgets that the expense owner is part of will be listed. This means that if the reporter changes the expense owner, the budget list gets updated. Learn more about reporting expenses on behalf of someone else
- For expenses, the Document date is used to determine the budget's activity status for that specific date. For example, if the Budget start date is April 5, 2024, then expenses can be reported with a Document date of April 5, 2024, or later. </aside>
Tracking Budget Status
Users with permissions can conveniently monitor each status within the Budgets section, where they have access to comprehensive budget information.
Status definitions:
- Within budget: expenditures remain within the allocated budget limit. In other words, the total reported records are well below the limit.
- Budget risk: this indicates that expenditures are nearing the budget limit.
- Over budget: expenditures have exceeded the allocated budget limit. An email notification will be sent to all budget owners in such cases.
Budget notifications
Expense approvers will receive alerts on expense details and notifications to aid informed decision-making when managing expenses.
- Email: upon receiving new pending expenses, the budget limit status at that time will be displayed.
- Expense detail: a status tag is included, accompanied by a tooltip containing budget information (name, reported amount, and available or overspent amount).
- Inbox: A status tag with associated tooltip reflecting the budget status will be added.