Working with Iterations

In terms of table maintenance, working with iterations is fairly straightforward. By creating records in the Phases table, you are specifying a location for your iteration records. Likewise, by establishing the Iteration List, you are creating an environment for versions of your organization's budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The key to the table setup for iterations is understanding the following:

• How iterations fit into the larger Budget Preparation table structure.

• How people at your workplace can best use the iteration functionality.

Iterations and Budget Worksheets

In reality, your budget always has a living area in the following system tables, which are populated when you perform an extraction of Fund Accounting data:

Initially, these tables store the ledger accounts you extracted from Fund Accounting along with any records that were added within Budget Preparation. If you use iterations, staff members will save copies of the data in these tables into iterations established in the Iteration List.

Employees can then load an iteration into the appropriate budget worksheet, apply budget projections, update the budget figures for individual ledger accounts, and re-save the data. The Budget Worksheet options show data from the tables introduced above. The tables store ledger data for whichever budget iteration was most recently loaded into the live database.

Phases and the Approval Process

The Phases table facilitates the budget's progress through the approval process. If you use iterations, you will have at least three phases in the Phases table, one for each of the standard budget levels: Requested, Recommended, and Approved. However, during the table setup process, your organization may decide to use additional phases, thereby allowing more approval levels.

Before you begin budgeting using Budget Preparation, you should take the opportunity to compare your current budgeting procedure with the functionality available in PowerSchool ERP software systems. In particular, your colleagues should understand that the Phases table allows for as many approval levels as needed since a final budget cannot be posted until all phases are closed.

Given this ability, you should take the following steps when establishing the Phases table:

1. Determine how many levels of approval are needed for the entire budgeting process.

2. Assign each level to one of the standard budget approval levels that already exists in Budget Preparation: Requested, Recommended, and Approved.

3. In the Phases table, enter the actual table records. Make sure to assign codes and titles that make clear each phase's position in the budget approval process.

4. In the Iteration List, enter records for the budget iterations tied to each record in the Phases table. Again, use codes and descriptions that will be meaningful to your employees.