Enabling and enforcing budget edits

General Ledger

For activity-related budget edits to work, you need to enable budget editing on System Codes (GL01.4). On this form, you can determine whether budget edits are enabled in these applications:

• General Ledger (GL)

• Requisitions (RQ)

• Purchase Order (PO)

• Accounts Payable (AP)

• Cash Management (CB)

• Employee Expense (EE)

• Project Accounting (AC)

When budget edits are activated for applications, you can add activity-related transactions, but if the budget is exceeded, you will receive a budget exceeded error message.

Activity Group

On the Budget tab of Activity Group (AC00.1), you can define budget edit parameters to enable the budget exceeded error message when adding activity transactions, manual commitments, or activity-related transactions from other applications to Project Accounting.

You will select whether budgets will be checked, and if so, how often. You will also select the budget level for budget edits: at the activity group level, at the activity level, at the activity and account category level, at the activity and summary account category level, or at the contract funding level (for use with the Grant Billing application).

Activity

On the Budget Overrides tab of Activity (AC10.1), you can override the activity group budget edit parameters for posting activities only, provided the activity group budget edit is not at the activity group level.

You will select whether budgets will be checked at the activity level, and if so, how often. You will also select the budget level for budget edits: at the activity level, at the activity and account category level, at the activity and summary account category level, or at the contract funding level (for use with the Grant Billing application).

Account Category Structure

If you choose to edit budgets at the activity and summary account category level, then you will also set up budget edits on the account category structure (AC08.1).

You can set the budget edit to occur on lowest summary level account categories, on detail account categories, or to ignore budget edits for any detail account categories that belong to a certain summary account category. For example, you can set the option to budget edit against a direct costs summary account category, but to ignore an indirect costs summary account category.

Example

Your organization has this account category structure:

• Direct Costs (summary level)

  • Labor (summary level)

    • Salary

    • Non-salary

  • Supplies (summary level)

    • Lab

    • Consortia

• Indirect Costs (summary level)

  • Fringe

  • F&A

Within the Supplies summary account category, you have a $1,000 budget in Lab and $1,000 budget in Consortia. This equals a total of $2,000 for Supplies. If overall, your organization wants to make sure all supply expenses do not exceed $2,000, then you can edit to the summary account category (Supplies). If your organization must stay within the $1,000 budget for each of the detail account categories, you can set the budget edit to the detail account category.