Budgets (March)

We have launched a new way of keeping an eye on your costs: Budgets.

With budgets, you can assign a certain amount of costs to an employee and their team. Each of their team member then contributes to their budget. Each budget has an owner (the user account) which in most cases will be the same as the employee, but doesn't need to be. This gives everybody a high-level overview of the costs:

As you can see, we allow going beyond 100% as this is just a visual feedback to now decide how to deal with this situation. To understand further who contributes to a budget, the details page shows every single employee that works underneath the assigned employee (be it direct or indirect reports). Furthermore you see the budget broken down into a monthly budget visualized with a red reference line. The monthly breakdown allows you to recognize trends, for example if you are below budget in the first months but go beyond budget in the final months.

Budgets can have an arbitrary timeframe, while the most common will be a fully calendar year. You can also break the budget down to as many employees as you want, giving you full flexibility in your approach.

If you decide to break it down for each employee, it's worth mentioning that an alternative approach might be to create a locked scenario for your budgeting and an editable one for your planning. The comparison page allows you to track how much you are in the budget. Ultimately both work and it's just a question of preference.

Some technical notes if you are interested:

• Permission wise it works as follows:
  • Everybody can create budgets but only assign it to employees they can see under their role
  • Users can see budgets if they are assigned to the budget, or if they have unrestricted employee access (e.g. admins)
  • Anyone with access to a budget can modify and delete. This is to not put a burden on users, as it's not destructive in the sense that budgets do not touch the planning itself
• For locked scenarios, budgets cannot be touched (creation/modification/deletion)
• Copying scenarios will also copy budgets