Project Budgeting for Employees

The PowerSchool ERP Budget Preparation System's Budget Entry center includes options for entering project budget figures for all three standard approval levels and up to four future years. Each option lets you update multiple Project Ledger accounts in a worksheet page.

Budget Preparation System Basics

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

This section introduces several key concepts: project budgeting in Budget Prep, the project budget worksheet, standard budget approval levels, and the ledger account's Freeze setting.

Project Budgeting Basics

As in the PowerSchool ERP Fund Accounting System, the project accounting records in Budget Preparation allow up to eight reporting levels. However, budget increases and decreases can only be applied to the lowest organizational reporting level defined in Budget Prep's Project List.

For example, if you use four project reporting levels and the levels are Project, Function, Component, and Task, you budget for the lowest level, Task. So if the Project is Playground Renovation, Function is Equipment, Component is Swing Sets, and Task is Labor, your budgeting entries would be applied to the project/account combination used in the Project List for Labor.

The number of reporting levels and the titles of the levels are set up in the Budget Preparation Profile. Note that the illustrations and examples in this section include asterisks before and after the field titles to indicate that they are user-defined. For simplicity, we use a three-level structure: *Project*, *Function*, and *Task*. If your system has more levels than this, the additional fields will appear in the windows affected.

Project Budget Worksheet

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

Similarly, each Project 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 each of the three standard approval levels. The Future Years option lets you enter figures for up to four additional years.

Standard Budget Approval Levels

The Budget Preparation System provides three levels of budget approval in the standard project budget worksheet: Requested, Recommended, and Approved. Your use of these levels depends on the budgeting procedures where you work.

For instance, you might proceed 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 budget might require added approval levels which are accommodated with iterations and phases.

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

In general, you should check with your colleagues and higher-level budget administrators regarding the following information:

The number of approval levels you are using. For information on iterations and phases, refer to Project Budget with Iterations.
When you should to begin the next level in the budget process.

Ledger Account Freeze Setting

Each ledger account record in the project budget worksheet has a Freeze setting 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 with the Apply/Move Budget 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 Project Budgeting for Administrators

Using the Worksheet

The project budget worksheet can be accessed by selecting the Requested, Recommended, Approved, and Future Years options in the Budget Entry center's Project section.

After you generate a list of Project 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 Project List 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.