CGI Advantage Financial is delivered with a budgeting area that satisfies a wide spectrum of public sector budgeting business requirements. This area can be customized and configured to accommodate the simplest model of a small local government up to the most complex model of a large state implementation.
Budgeting allows you to control the following types of budget activities, or a combination of these activities:
Central Expense - tracks spending activities centrally within an application for all organizational parties. ”Expense” is broadly defined to include all types of spending: cash expenditures, accrued expenditures, encumbrances, and pre encumbrances. Controls are very likely applied on such a budget structure.
Decentralized Expense - allows expense activities to be controlled independently by groups at various levels of an organization entity at a lower or different level than a central expense budget. Controls are optionally applied on such a budget structure, depending on the organizational entity.
Central Revenue - tracks revenue activities centrally within an application for all organizational parties. ”Revenue” is broadly defined to include accrued revenue as well as collected revenue. Controls are not likely applied to revenue budgets.
Decentralized Revenue - allows revenue activities to be controlled independently by groups at various levels of an organizational entity at a lower or different level than a central revenue budget. Controls are not likely applied to revenue budgets.
Cost Accounting - supports the CGI Advantage Financial Cost Accounting functionality in allowing entities to track expenses and revenues related to grants, programs, and internal jobs. Such a budget may even control reimbursement activity.
Combined or 'Both' Structure - tracks both expense and revenue activities at a common chart of account level with an application for all organizational parties.
Standard vs. Extended Budget
Budget structures that contain the chart of account (COA) element Appropriation often work in one of two ways. The first, Extended, often matches very large sites such as states where budgeting dollars are legislated at a very high level that can span multiple Funds and Departments. In such a case, an Appropriation is shared by multiple entities and more than one appropriation may be used for funding a certain type of spending (and sometimes revenue). Here Appropriations are entered by users just like any other COA code to complete a funding string.
In contrast to Extended, many sites operate as Standard, which results from much more targeted budget dollars. Here an Appropriation is for a single Fund and Department. Very often the definition goes further to a single Unit within a Department for a single Object or Revenue Source. For this reason, the Appropriation code can be inferred. Users typically do not even know what Appropriation may be associated with a combination of COA.
To accomplish the inference, the common COA feature of an inference table is used. Certain budget structure and level combinations, when operating in Standard mode (refer to the ”Inference Tables” section for more details), will automatically populate an inference table when a budget line is created so the inference will happen automatically for users.
There are six such inference tables provided. Please see each individual table to see the fields used to determine the inference and the field(s) inferred. Please refer to the ”Examples of Delivered COA Inferences” section in the CGI Advantage Financial - Chart of Accounts User Guide for more information on the specifics of each table.