Revenue Budgeting for Employees

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

Budget Preparation System Basics

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

In the revenue budget worksheet, you can access budget 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 and update the account's complete budget record.

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

Revenue Budget Worksheet

The revenue budget worksheet is a database table storing the budget data for all your organization's Revenue Ledger accounts. Using the Budget Entry center's Revenue 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 revenue budget worksheet.

Similarly, each Revenue 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.

For more information on the revenue budget worksheet, refer to the next section, Using the Worksheet.

Standard Budget Approval Levels

The Budget Preparation System provides three levels of budget approval in the standard revenue 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 budget might require added approval levels which are accommodated with iterations and phases.

Whatever the case, your 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 the 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.
When you should to proceed to the next level in the budget process.

Ledger Account Freeze Setting

Each ledger account record in the revenue 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 with 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 Revenue Budgeting for Administrators.

Using the Worksheet

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

After you generate a list of Revenue 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.