If you don’t see this in your navigation, your administrator can switch the module on under Administration → Modules, or it may not be included in your plan.
How a proposal is approved
A plan is not sent for approval as a whole. Each proposal on it is submitted and approved on its own, in your organisation’s Capex Proposal workflow, once your organisation has switched to approving proposals one at a time under capex planning settings. A plan that was sent as a whole before the switch finishes as it started, and says so at the top when you open it. A proposal’s Proposal status says where it stands:
Where no Capex Proposal workflow applies to a proposal, submitting it approves it for the consolidation plan straight away, and the screen says so. A proposal’s Approval status is the status of its request in the words Approvals uses — Pending until its last level has approved — and clicking it opens that request in Approvals.
The register
The Plans tab is a register like any other: Search plans, saved Views, Filter and Columns, with your choice of columns and order remembered. Above it, These will be refused when they are sent names draft plans with blocking checks — a proposal with a value and no cashflow behind it, or one in another currency — each fixable while the plan is a draft. Your administrator can switch that panel off in Form Studio; the checks themselves still apply.
Where your administrator has added questions of your own to the plan in Form Studio and marked them reportable, each one is also offered as a column. Your administrator can also give the register a # column numbering its rows.
On the Checks tab, Approved proposals with no budget head lists plans whose approved proposals have nowhere to be charged yet, each with how many are without a head; somebody holding the release permission has to open their heads. When nothing is flagged it says every proposal sits inside its division’s value band, every carry forward points at an approved case, and none has run past its original sanction.
Planning windows
Your organisation can give each financial year a planning window — the days on which units may enter their plans — under capex planning settings. Both days are included, read in your organisation’s timezone, and a window set for one division overrides the one set for every division. Outside its window, a unit plan for that year cannot be started or changed, and proposals cannot be added to it. A draft that was not finished by the last day stays as it stands: it can be read, but not changed. Opening one shows Plans for this year are accepted from … to …, and today is outside those dates. This draft can be read, but not changed or submitted., and the buttons that would change it are not offered. A proposal an approver has already reviewed and sent back can still be corrected after the window closes. Approval, consolidation and opening budget heads are never held to a window, and neither is a division plan, which is head office’s work after the units stop. A year with no window is open all year.Starting a plan
Capex Plan opens the form for a new plan, titled Capex Plan, and needs Start a capex plan. Its first section is headed Capex Planning; Start at the foot starts the plan. Where the company the chosen fiscal calendar belongs to has no functional currency, Start is held and the form says {company} has no functional currency, so a plan cannot be counted in it. An administrator sets one in Settings, under Organisation structure. Units that have been switched off are not offered.
Each date has to fall strictly after the one before it; a date out of order is highlighted. The plan’s header and the register show its Fiscal Calendar.
Where your administrator has kept Mail subject from your role in Form Studio but still insists on
an answer, the box is closed and Start stays held; a sentence under the box says your role may
not write the subject and that an administrator can let it, or untick Must be answered, in Form
Studio.
The invite
Starting a plan mails its timeline to the members of the teams under Send Invite To, copied to the people under CC, under the plan’s Mail subject — so somebody running several plans in one round can tell readers which plan a mail is about. The invite carries the plan’s name and description, and attaches the plan’s files that have passed a virus check, to the people who may open them in the product, within the limits set under capex planning settings — by default up to 5 files and 10 MB together. Every file is also named in the mail with a link to the plan, so a file that was too large, or that a reader may not open, is still one click away. The links in the invite and the reminder mails open the plan by its code. A system with no virus scanner attaches none and links them all. When you start a plan with files, the invite waits until they have uploaded, so it goes with them.Inside a plan
Open a plan from the register. The header shows Division, Unit, Fiscal Calendar, Requested and what it was Consolidated into, and either the plan’s Status or — once proposals are approved one at a time — Proposals, counted by proposal status.
There is no Submit for a plan: what goes to approvers is each proposal, from its row.
The mail subject in the edit dialog. The subject sits under The invite mail, after the
planning calendar’s dates and above Send Invite To and CC, as on the Capex Plan form,
because it is saved with them and the save that first names somebody is the one that sends the
invite. Questions of your own that your administrator placed in the planning calendar or the invite
mail in Form Studio are drawn in the same sections, after the dates and after the subject. It can be changed until the invite has gone, including while the invite waits
for the plan’s files; after that it is read-only and says whether the invite went under this subject
or the template’s. A plan that has told nobody yet and has no subject — one carried forward, or
started before subjects were asked — is asked for one before a save that names its first audience.
The box is also read-only where your administrator has made Mail subject read-only in Form Studio
(a plan’s first subject can still be given), captioned (not yours to answer) where your role may
not write it, and left off where it is hidden from your role.
Below the buttons, Description shows the plan’s description as its author wrote it, pictures included, and Files on this plan lists the supporting documents, each of which you can open. Both fold away and stay folded the next time. Both stay readable whatever the plan’s status, which is how a committee reads the case it is deciding. Where your administrator has hidden the description from your role, neither the description nor its pictures are shown.
Proposals
The Proposals tab lists each proposal on the plan. Clicking a row opens the proposal to read, every answer greyed in its form, with Edit or Correct at the foot where you may do either.
The ⋯ at the front of each row holds what you may do with that proposal now:
Above the list:
Proposals can be added while the plan’s planning window is open and the plan is not out as a whole.
Adding a proposal from the menu
Finance → Capex → Add Proposal in the navigation opens the proposal form on its own page, so somebody who only adds proposals does not have to find the plan first. It is shown to roles holding Add capex proposals, and submit the ones you added, which your administrator grants on the Access screen.
The proposal form
Add Capex Proposal (or Edit in a row’s ⋯) opens the proposal form, titled Add Capex Proposal, Edit Proposal or View Proposal. Where the Copilot is switched on, Describe a new proposal out loud or Read a new proposal off a photograph or a document fills it in for you to check. Your administrator arranges the form, and can hide the cost centre, asset class and book depreciation rate and insist on other answers, in Form Studio. A required question is marked with an asterisk.
Every amount holds at most ten digits before the decimal point.
The buttons at the foot depend on how your organisation approves proposals:
Writing a justification
The justification is the case a committee approves money on, so it has a document editor of its own: heading levels, text size, colour and highlight, alignment, numbered, lettered and bulleted lists, tables whose rows and columns you can add, remove, merge and split in place, pictures, and PDFs (drawn as a card that opens in the product’s viewer). You can also import an HTML file’s content as text. Pasting from Word, Excel or a web page keeps headings, tables and formatting, and a pasted table arrives as a table rather than a picture of one. A picture or PDF pasted on its own is attached. A Word document pasted as a file, and EMF, WMF, TIFF and SVG pictures, are refused with what to do instead, and anything a paste could not bring across is listed above the text. A picture copied from a plan’s description into a justification, or the other way round, is replaced by a note naming it — attach it again where you want it. Pictures and PDFs are held in your browser until you save, then sent in order with a progress line (Sending 1 of 3 …). If one does not arrive, nothing is saved and the file is named; saving again sends only what is outstanding. Closing the form without saving leaves nothing behind.Putting proposals in from a spreadsheet
Upload proposals reads an.xlsx or .csv file in your browser and checks it before anything is written. An older .xls file is refused: open it in Excel, save it as .xlsx, and choose it again.
The template carries Category, Sub-Category, Unit, Location, Reference ID, Fresh sanction amount for current FY and Approved carryover amount from previous year, and leaves out Proposal value, which is not typed. A row’s value is its two amounts added up where either is given, and a Proposal value column is read only where neither is, so a sheet of the old shape still reads. Category (P/S/C/F), Proposal status and Approval status are written into a download for reading and never read back. A file from before departments came off proposals still uploads, its Department column left out with a notice, and so does a file with the Head column downloads used to carry.
Reference ID is how a carry forward names the approved proposal it continues, by that proposal’s Proposal ID, as the form’s Reference ID does. It is matched among the finally approved proposals you can reach, and the carry forward takes the same Proposal ID. It must be filled in on a new carry forward, and a download writes it for every carry forward. On a fresh-money row it is not read, and a file without the column leaves every link as it is.
An upload reads full numbers only. A file downloaded with Amounts shown in set to anything but Full numbers is refused before a row is read: download it again at Full numbers, make your changes in that one, and upload it.
Phasing is not uploaded; enter it on each proposal. A plan downloaded with Download to Excel and uploaded again unchanged comes back as itself.
Phasing
Phasing is switched on or off for your organisation in Form Studio. Off, there is no Phasing action, no Phased column and no phasing sheet in the download, and no proposal is refused for having no phasing. Phasing opens a grid: tabs for the measures — Cashflow, Capitalisation, Book depreciation and Tax depreciation — and columns for the plan year’s periods month by month, then the next four years as single figures (only cashflow is asked that far out). Under the grid, This measure adds up what you have typed beside the Proposal value. A save replaces a measure’s whole row, so clearing a cell is the same as filling one in. A plan’s calendar is one financial year, so the grid has its columns from the first day. Only a plan started before calendars held a single year can be for a year its calendar does not have; the grid then says … has no periods.Checks
The Checks tab lists each finding with its #, Proposal ID, Proposal, Severity and What.Approving a proposal
A submitted proposal reaches its approvers on Approvals, one request per proposal, level by level. An approver can Approve, Reject, Send back for revision to whoever raised it, or Rollback to the level before, as with any request; a rejection at any level is final. Where your administrator has switched Correct on in Form Studio, the approver a proposal is waiting on can press Correct in its row on the plan — or on the proposal opened from Proposal Consolidation — before approving. The form opens saying Correcting at their step. They may change any field but its unit, location, quantity, category and amount, and may move its phasing between months: each measure has to add up to what it did, because changing the total changes the amount, which is done by sending the proposal back for revision. Where the approver’s step of the workflow names the category as theirs to change, Mark it Flexible is offered beside Category (P/S/C/F). With Correct off, approvers change only the fields their own step of the workflow names, in Approvals. A plan sent as a whole before your organisation switched is decided line by line in Approvals, where each proposal shows its Category and its Justification, and an approver holding Mark a proposal Flexible while its plan is with approvers can press Mark Flexible or Take Flexible off on a line. When the last level approves, the proposal is Approved for Consolidation Plan and gets a row on Consolidated Planning, where head office plans it and its planning is approved in turn, and a plan on Capitalization Planning.Proposal Consolidation
Proposal Consolidation, headed Capex - Proposal Consolidation, lists every proposal on every plan you can open, for whoever consolidates a round across units and divisions rather than one plan at a time. It needs View capex proposals, and shows only the proposals on plans you can reach.
The plan’s checks, and Submit selected, stay on the plan, where its window and totals are in view.
Changing or deleting many proposals at once
A tick box stands beside the ⋯ of each proposal you may change or delete. Tick the ones you want and the bar at the foot offers Edit selected and Delete selected, each only where a ticked proposal allows it, because changing and deleting are separate permissions. Clear unticks them. Edit selected opens boxes in the grid itself, on the rows you ticked, for the proposal’s name, its coordinator, the amount its investment type asks, and — where you have turned the columns on — quantity, priority, nature of investment, category and sub-category. A box is offered only where Form Studio leaves the field on the edit form for you, and the value follows the amount as you type. Save saves each proposal you changed as its own form would, so a proposal that is refused says why on its own row while the rest are saved; Cancel leaves them as they were. If you changed nothing, nothing is saved and the screen says so. Delete selected asks Do you want to delete the {count} selected proposals? and deletes each. Any ticked proposal that cannot be deleted now is left as it is, and the question says how many.Bulk upload
Bulk upload adds and corrects proposals on every plan you can open from one file. It is offered to people who may add proposals or change them.
A file that adds proposals needs Add capex proposals, and submit the ones you added, and one that corrects them needs Change a capex proposal and its phasing. A plan’s own Download to Excel uploads here unchanged.
Opening the money
Approved proposals with no budget head look identical to funded ones from the plan side, which is why the Checks tab flags them. Opening heads is a deliberate step — Open budget heads on the plan — after which the money can be charged.Consolidated Planning
Where head office plans each approved proposal’s cash outflow, GST credit and asset block.
Configuring capex planning
How proposals are approved, value bands per division, planning windows, reminders and invite files.
Budgets
Where approved proposals become heads that orders are charged against.