What is a Budget Ledger?

A budget ledger refers to a completely separate set of transactions that are used to hold another set of values, for example budget values or commitment values.

You can define several different budget ledgers for a business unit, depending on the number of budgets you want to maintain. For example, in any financial year you may need to maintain budget ledgers for:

  • the current working budget, which is referred to as the primary budget
  • a revised budget
  • the expenditure commitments
  • next year's budget under development.

For each business unit you have one actuals ledger and up to ten budget ledgers. These ledgers are identified by the letters A through K, where A refers to the actuals ledger and B to K refer to the ten budget ledgers.

A budget ledger is created using Optional Ledger Tables (OLT). Its use is identified using Budget Labels (BLB).

Two budget ledgers can be used to control expenditure: the primary budget ledger, and the purchase commitment ledger. These are identified in the Business Unit Setup.

You access a budget ledger, or return to the actuals ledger, using Change Budget (CBG).

The static data records that have been defined for your actual ledger apply to each of your budget ledgers. This means that each budget ledger contains the same set of accounts, analysis dimensions, and analysis codes as the actual ledger. It also uses the same business unit and ledger processing rules.

The majority of the Financials facilities that are available in the actual ledger, can be used in a budget ledger to enter and maintain budget values. The main budgeting forms are:

  • Ledger Entry (LEN) can be used to enter or amend the budget values for an account, or account range.
  • Journal Types (JNT) and Journal Presets can be used to define special budgeting transaction types and presets.
  • Corporate Allocations can be used to create budget values based on values in another ledger e.g. actuals or other budgets.

The exceptions include the payment related forms, for example Payment Run (PYR), Payment Collection Run (PYC) and Payment Documents (PYD).

Note: If you are using the Fixed Asset Register, budget ledgers can be used to maintain asset budgets.