Required Budget

However, before that determination of what budget structures have to be updated begins, the application determines if the transaction will have a budget impact. Such a determination comes from the posting codes used on the posting lines of the transaction. Those posting codes defined on the Posting Code (PSCD) page have 3 different types of budget update settings:

• No Budget Structures

• Expense & Both Budget Structures

• Revenue & Both Budget Structures

Once it has been determined that a posting line is to update a type of budget structure, the system will search for a matching line on all active budget structures of that type for all budget levels and make updates. Then the system will read Required Budget to evaluate if it made an update to all required budget structures for their required budget levels. That evaluation starts with the required field of Budget FY. Very simple rules can require a budget structure based on just a Budget FY.  A more complex rule can be established using one or more of the Criteria fields.  One such situation would be that a department expense budget is required by combining the Budget FY and a department code as Criteria 1.  Posting lines with those two would require a matching budget line be found on that department structure, but the same Budget FY and another department code would not require a match.

When a match is found, an update to that structure must be made or a 'budget line not found' error is returned to the user. When there is not enough chart of account (COA) codes on the transaction to make an update to a required budget structure, the same error is issued. This feature makes Required Budget another means of requiring COA values and makes it, in conjunction with the budget structure, another means of defining valid COA combinations. Both of these features make up what if often called Presence Control. Such control required there to be a budget line defined for the COA, but not necessarily available budget. To add the availability requirement to a budget structure/level/line would make it Full Control. The combination of Required Budget and one or more budget controls put into place with an error level of reject or overrideable (at the least) provides for this full control.

There was a third type of control in prior Advantage applications, No Control, which could mean two things. First, the COA combination did not have to be on a valid budget line because that COA was non-budgeted. Second, it would mean that if the COA combination did not exist, then a budget line would be automatically created. When not enough COA exists to generate a budget line, there will be a message issued for each element required but not present. That message is issued for each budget level that is not optional, including the audit level.

• Budget controls should not be utilized for those budget structures that use the automatic budget line generation feature. If controls are employed, then budget control errors will be issued along with the informational messages that lines are being automatically generated. Such controls with a violation action of reject would actually prohibit the line(s) from being generated. There are times when controls and automatic generation can work together. Given a two level budget structure where lines are only created by the budget office for level 1 and level 2 is just for tracking, would be such a situation. A control would be placed only on level 1 and Required Budget would be set to Auto Generate. Then if an accounting transaction used a combination of COA that did not match an existing line at level 1, the transaction would reject upon auto generating that line because it would immediately go negative. If a line had been found at level 1, but it did not have enough authority, the transaction would still fail. However, if the line at level 1 had enough authority and no level 2 line existed, the accounting transaction would update the level 1 line and generate a level 2 line.

• Be careful not to establish rules that would require a structure when all activity that meets the rule will not contain enough COA to meet the budget. Required Budget is useful in requiring COA in this manner, but may conflict with other COA rules like the Event Requirements (ERQ) page, for example.

• Structures not required will require the establishment of budget lines before their COA combinations are used.  When this does not happen, the systems assurance job for budgets will find the accounting activity that matches the budget line with no matching update on the budget line. As that program does not compare the date of the accounting activity to the date of budget line creation, it will evaluate the line as being out of sync.