Activities or Projects can have multiple types of Budgets

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Activities have multiple budget types available.

They can be Life Only Budgets – just to make sure that you have not gone over the total budgeted amount for the project.  This works well when:

  1. The project spans multiple years to be completed such as a new building
  2. You are managing your project budget in a different system and just want to know if you have exceeded the total budget for a project.

They can be Annual and Period budgets – these automatically interact.  If you make a change at the period level, it will be reflected in the annual view and if a change is made to the Annual budget, it will be reflected in the Period Budgets.

There are multiple ways to create budgets:

  1. You can spread a total budget amount over multiple years or just a single Fiscal Year. You can create spread codes that allow you to determine how to spread the amounts – periodically, Quarterly, every other month, etc.
  2. You can use a Compute Statement to create the budget
  3. You can create a budget based on Last year’s Budget or Actuals
  4. You can create a budget for both or either amounts or units.

You can budget at multiple levels

  • Activity Group – least detailed – all activities in this group will be included in the budgeted amounts
  • Activity Only – this is for a specific activity and would be for all account categories
  • Activity and Summary Account Category – If you use summary account categories in your structure, you can create a higher level budget for things like CapEx and Opex instead of creating a detailed budget for each type of cost.
  • Activity and Account Category – this is the most detail level budget for each activity for each type of expense or revenue item.

Budget Edits – will not allow transactions to post to an activity if it will exceed the budgeted amount plus any tolerance specified.  A good way of getting around causing the budget edits to prevent transactions is to add a large tolerance, like 99%  – basically doubling the budget before edits will prevent new transactions.