Budget Feature Conversion Tip

If your organization is considering using the budget transaction feature, there are a few items to consider before ‘flipping the switch’. If you are not familiar with this feature, what it supports is the ability to enter a budget amount for the project with a specific date field. This budget amount can then be categorized by a type such as labor, expenses, etc. and can also be categorized by your services (activities) in the organization. It also support an allocation feature of budget %’s to named resources along with reason categories for the allocation. Check out the Budget Transaction information the OpenAir Admin User Guide under the Support tab for more information on this feature.

Without the budget transaction feature activated, the project properties form supports a budget (money) field which is a currency entry field. You enter the budget amount here and now standard reporting fields like Incurred vs. budget are available for use. You can also view the budget amounts in the list views as a separate column. Users start considering the budget transaction feature when the topic of change orders or additional funding comes into play. If you use the standard budget field, there is no historical tracking of information in this field other than running an audit trail report on the project itself. By using the budget transaction feature, you can enter a new transaction for any budget changes (positive or negative) and the total budget amount will be displayed in the budget (money) field on the properties form as read-only.

Converting to this feature does require some planning however. Before flipping the budget transaction feature switch (an internal switch that can be enabled by OpenAir Support), run a detail report for projects to include the following fields: Internal id , project name, currency (if your company has multi-currency), budget (money). Other fields may be added but the ones mentioned here are the key ones. Now you have a full list of the project budget values. These will then need to be loaded back into the project as budget transaction after the switch is enabled. Why? When the switch is enabled, the budget (money) field will become read-only and display the current value that was in place before the switch was changed. However, the first time you add a transaction to the project, the value of the budget transaction will replace whatever is in the read-only field. This is why it is important to save a full budget value list from your projects so you can upload the initial budget transactions back into the projects and maintain your data accuracy.

How do you load budget transactions? This is done using the OpenAir database loading tool – feel free to give TOP Step a call for more information!!!!