Budgeting enables campuses to manage the annual budgeting and activity funding of the organizations on campus. It will adapt to a variety of budgeting procedures and is powerful enough to replace traditional methods of manual record keeping. Budgeting permits both organization and individual budget requests depending on process settings.
Define your budgeting process
The first step in using Budgeting is to define your process. You can have any number of Budgeting Processes open at one time, and all will be available as options for organizations and/or individuals.
To create or modify a budgeting process, navigate to the "Admin" area of your site. Next, choose "Budgeting Processes" from the Finance drop down. In order to create or modify a budgeting process, a user must have "Full" access to the Finance Community Limited Admin permission.
Select the process you would like to modify or choose +Create Process to make a new budgeting process.
Next, complete the provided form. Here’s a quick breakdown of the fields:
| Form field | Description |
| Process Name | The title of your budgeting process. This is visible to users and organizations submitting budget requests. |
| Description | More information about the purpose of your budgeting process. |
| Process Availability | Determine if the budgeting process is active or not. |
| Restrict Submissions by Date | Determine the time period when the budgeting process will be open. |
| Submissions Accepted From | Determine who is able to submit budget requests. |
| Additional Information | Determine if you’d like to set up custom questions. |
| Request amount | Determine if you’d like users to request one amount of money or provide line items as an option. |
After you complete the first page, you cannot make any changes to the last three settings so make sure everything looks good before moving forward! When you’re ready, click the Next button in the bottom right of the page. The next pages you see depend on what you defined in your settings. For example, you will only be asked to set up additional questions if you opted to include them. These are the additional pages you may be asked to complete:
| Page name | Description |
| Custom Questions | These questions will be presented to the user completing a request under your budget process. Typically, this is used to find out more information about the money they’re requesting. |
| Budget Template | Determine how you want users to format the money they’re requesting. If you chose "multi-line budget" on the previous page, you can set up multiple budget items, each with sub-categories, then line items. Think of budget items as your overall category and users can choose which budget item to request money from. After they choose a line item, they’ll be prompted to complete each section. You can choose to make them optional or required. You can also set up a description and minimum/maximum amount for each section and line item. |
| Workflow | Determine the workflow for incoming budget requests. You can establish a multi-step process with a different set of reviewers in each location. Determine how much power each set of reviewers has, from their ability to approve or deny a request to moving the request to a different step in the process. You can also give them the ability to edit the amount requested within each submission. |
When you’ve finished editing your finance process and you’re ready for it to go live, check your active setting and the open and close dates. If these settings are correct, your finance process will be available for individuals and/or organizations when they go to make a new request.
Manage Incoming Requests
Reviewers can access incoming requests under the "Manage" tab. If the reviewer has submissions available for their review, these will appear under the Budget Requests column. You can also select "View All" here to filter requests, export request lists, or browse approved and denied requests. You can export the request list to a .csv (containing all requests) or PDF (filtered to the existing list).
The request list displays the request ID, current step, name, submitter, and amount are provided for each request. Click on a request to jump in and see more information. Use the tabs provided at the top of the page to switch between basic details about the request, additional information (your custom questions) and the budget request itself. The first tab also allows you to view the request history and move the request between stages, depending on your permission level. You can also manually add a reviewer to the current step as needed. Under the "Request History" header, you can add a comment to the request and specify its visibility to either requester and reviewers, reviewers only, or as a private note.
As an administrator, you should see the option to approve (if it's on the last step) or deny the request. If your campus uses the Organization Accounting module in addition to the Budgeting module, an administrator can elect to create an allocation into the designated account upon approving the request: