Explore The World Of Budget Tools

You’re probably getting ramped up for the start of your new fiscal year! With the new fiscal year quickly approaching, you’ll probably be looking towards the exciting world of Budget Management within The Financial Edge. This is an optional module, which allows for project, account, and grant budgets to all be conveniently located in one place in The Financial Edge! How can budgeting get any better than that? Let’s take a look at some neat features that we can use when we want to manipulate the budget from one fiscal year to the next.

Let’s dive into the world of Budget Tools! Let’s go to General Ledger, Records, and Budgets. Here, let’s open an existing budget that you would like to work with. Once inside our budget, let’s click on the word Budget in the top left corner and then choose Budget Tools. A screen will open with a wide array of options for us to choose from! If you really want to utilize Budget Tools, but you just aren’t sure which option is best for your organization, this blog should help you!

Let’s talk about some of the specifics regarding Budget Tools. If you simply want to increase or decrease your account budget, grant budget, or project budget, you would select that specific option. These allow for either an increase or decrease to the budgets by amount or percent, which makes budgeting easier and more efficient. If your budget will be exactly the same as last year’s budget, except all accounts or projects will be given an equal increase, this is a great option!

Copying budgets allows for an organization to make a copy of an existing budget and use that in a future fiscal year. Forecasting gives Financial Edge users the option to copy actual amounts (rather than budgeted amounts) from one year to another.  When we forecast, we are able to copy current year actual figures and project actuals for the rest of the year. Forecasting is good if your organization wants to add a new budget based on the current year’s activity before the end of the year. Check out more information about copying/forecasting budgets if this is appealing to you!

Merging budget scenarios is another useful tool! If you have two separate budget scenarios that you would like to combine, you can make that dream a reality with this option! For large organizations with multiple departments, merging scenarios allows for all department budgets to come together to be a part of the organization’s overall budget. Check out more important information about merging scenarios if this excites you.

If none of the options listed above are what you are looking for, maybe you want to clear your budget or even delete the scenario. We recommend making a backup of your database before completing either of these tasks. Clearing a budget allows you to choose which budget amounts to delete from an existing budget scenario.  This is a good selection to make when you want to start the budget process over for that specific scenario ID and year. Deleting a Scenario ID should only be done when that scenario will not be used in any fiscal year in the future and has not been used for one in the past. We recommend clearing a budget rather than deleting an entire scenario, as deleting it would delete all occurrences of that scenario for every fiscal year that exists.

Our last Budget Tool option is to finalize scenarios. This locks the budgeted amounts for the scenario ID for that fiscal year, and changes cannot be made to a finalized budget unless they are entered in as budget adjustments. We recommend only finalizing budgets when your organization feels that your budget is complete.

I hope that this rendition of Financial Edge blogs will assist you with all of your Budget Tool endeavors. Cheers to a happy and successful new fiscal year!