Expenditure Budgeting for Employees

The PowerSchool ERP Budget Preparation System's Budget Entry center includes options for entering expenditure budget figures for all three standard approval levels and up to four future years. Each option lets you update multiple Expenditure Ledger accounts in a worksheet page. This chapter describes the pages and procedures for preparing an expenditure budget through the Budget Entry center. It also provides an overview of how the center's expenditure options fit into the overall budget process.

Budget Preparation System Basics

Before you work with the Budget Entry center to prepare the expenditure budget, it is helpful to have a general understanding of how the Budget Preparation System stores data and how various functionality affects that data.

In the expenditure budget worksheet, you can access figures for either the level selected in the Budget Entry center or the previous approval level. You can also work with an account in a detail page, where you can access the account's complete budget record.

This section introduces several key concepts: the expenditure budget worksheet, standard budget approval levels, and the ledger account's Freeze setting.

Expenditure Budget Worksheet

The expenditure budget worksheet is a database table storing the expenditure budget data for all of your organization's Expenditure Ledger accounts. Using the Budget Entry center's Expenditure section, you can access budget information for the ledger accounts related to your job duties. In actuality, these accounts form just a portion of the overall budget in the expenditure budget worksheet.

Similarly, each Expenditure option accesses a specific portion of the worksheet data stored for the ledger accounts you are budgeting. The first three options, Requested, Recommended, and Approved, access fields for budgeting at each of the three standard approval levels. The Future Years option lets you enter budget figures for up to four additional years.

For more details on the worksheet, refer to the next section, Using the Worksheet.

StandardBudget Approval Levels

The Budget Preparation System provides three levels of budget approval in the expenditure budget worksheet: Requested, Recommended, and Approved. Your use of these levels depends on your organization's budgeting procedures

For instance, you might move from the Requested directly to the Approved level, making revisions in between. On the other hand, the size of your organization or complexity of your budgeting might require added approval levels. These can be accommodated with Expenditure Budget with Iterations, which are copies of either part of a budget or an entire budget that can be worked on and saved.

Whatever the case, your budget administrators will move ledger account data from one approval level to the next when the budget figures are ready. Meanwhile, you can use the Budget Entry center's options to submit amounts for the appropriate ledger accounts at each stage in the budgeting process.

Before starting your budget, you should check with your colleagues and higher-level budget administrators to determine the following:

The number of approval levels being used.
The timeframe for proceeding from one level to the next in the budget process.

Ledger Account Freeze Setting

Each ledger account record in the expenditure budget worksheet has a Freeze field for preserving budget figures at a specified level. You can freeze budget figures at any of the three standard approval levels or at the Future Year level.

The Freeze setting prevents your budget figures from being overwritten through use of the Apply/Move option in the Budget Administrator center. Following is a listing of the Freeze field settings with an explanation of how each selection affects system processing:

D - Requested Level - Prevents budget projections from being applied at the Requested level for the ledger account.

R - Recommended Level - Prevents budget projections from being applied at the Recommended level for the ledger account. Also, budget amounts cannot be moved from the Requested to the Recommended level.

A - Approved Level - Prevents budget amounts from being moved from the Recommended to the Approved level for the ledger account.

F - Future Level - Prevents budget projections from being applied to the Future Year fields for the ledger account.

N - Not Frozen - Ledger account is not frozen at any level.

For information on the Apply/Move Budget option, refer to Expenditure Budgeting for Administrators.

Using the Worksheet

The expenditure budget worksheet can be accessed by selecting the Requested, Recommended, Approved, or Future Years option in the Budget Entry center's Expenditure section.

After you generate a list of Expenditure Ledger accounts, you can quickly move from one account to the next, updating budget data along the way. The worksheet displays the following values for each ledger account:

Budget amounts saved at the Requested and Current Year levels.
Codes and descriptions of the account's Organization Chart and Account List records.
Approval level where the ledger account's budget figures are frozen.

Navigating the Worksheet

Use the following keystrokes to move within the worksheet:

Up or Down Arrow: Moves you up or down by one row within a column.
<Tab>: Moves you to the next column in a row, then to the next row.
<Shift + Tab>: Moves you to the previous column in a row.
Page Up or Page Down: Displays the next or previous page of accounts.

Displaying Iteration Data

Above the worksheet, the system displays the current iteration and phase loaded at each standard approval level for the account currently being accessed. The iteration information only appears if records are set up in Budget Preparation's Iterations and Phases tables.

Note that the iteration data can change from account to account if there are different iterations loaded for different accounts.