Budgets

A budget is a register of money set aside for a financial year — separate from depreciation, which tracks what the fleet is worth rather than what’s been approved to spend.

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Heads

A budget is a tree of heads. A head can be a total carved into smaller heads underneath it, or a leaf — the level money is actually charged at. A leaf head names a cost centre and, optionally, a site. Only a leaf with nothing charged to it yet can become a total; the reverse also holds, so the tree can’t end up with money against a branch. Every head belongs to one fiscal calendar and year — the calendar names the head’s company, so that isn’t asked twice — and is either capital or operating spend. A head opens as a draft and takes nothing until it’s activated, at which point its whole sanctioned amount is released. If your approval process releases money in steps rather than all at once, pull the balance back out after opening it.

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When it runs out

Each head sets what happens once nothing’s left:

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What’s on the register

Three things this register leads with, because each is a figure nothing else in the product can see:

• Over-committed heads — only reachable on a head set to Warn, since one set to Block already refused the order that would have done it.
• Sanctioned and never released — money approved in principle that hasn’t been let out, whether that’s a deliberate staged release or simply forgotten.
• Heads with nothing pointed at them — a leaf with a full balance and no documents or entries against it isn’t necessarily good news; it may just be a head nobody’s using.

Committed is the money already promised to a supplier and not yet billed — including purchase requests still sitting in an approval queue, which reserve against the head at submission rather than at issue. Actual is spend after the fact, on every ledger in the product. The two are shown side by side because they answer different questions.

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Charging documents to a head

A purchase requisition or order can be charged to a leaf head, reserving its estimated value from submission. A capital project can be funded from a head instead — project cost lands on the head as an actual the moment it’s recorded, which is the opposite direction from an order, because opening a project reserves nothing.

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Amendments and overruns

The Amendments tab is the register of changes made to a head after it opened — a sanction increased, a head split, a transfer between two heads. Over or late collects heads that have gone over and requests to release more against one that has.