Caroline works at City Gate Ministries, a non-profit in Washington, DC and wanted to know how to set up budgets to keep track of spending against her grants.

However, the budgets aren’t at the “grant” level, but rather by category of spending underneath each grant.  For example, within a grant, there is a budgeted amount for office supplies, another budget for computer supplies, and so on.  That is, there is a separate budget for each G/L Account within each Cost Center.

In SpendMap, budgets are set up in the Cost Center Master File.  So first things first, you’ll want to rename “Cost Center” to whatever it is that you’re tracking charges by (“Grant” in Caroline’s case).  You can do that in here…
– PURCHASING > Setup system > User defined terminology and settings > User defined field names and terminology

Then, in the Cost Center Master File, notice the three folders/tabs at the top of the screen…

So if your budgets are at the Cost Center level (i.e. regardless of the type of spending), then you should be using the [Budgets] folder/tab.  However, if you want to track budgets by G/L Account within each Cost Center, then use the [Matching G/L Accounts/Budgets] Tab instead, where you will be able to enter separate budget amounts for each account code.

Time-Based or Overall Budgets

Also please note that SpendMap supports both “time-based” budgets (e.g. monthly, yearly, quarterly, etc.) or, if your budgets are not specific to a time period, you can specify “overall” budgets that span all time.

For example, most people who track departmental budgets would use time-based budgets (e.g. the Marketing Department can spend a certain amount each month), whereas it’s very common to use “overall” budgets for things like projects, grants, etc., where the spending is not locked to a specific date range (e.g. a project could last 5 years).

Importing Budget Data

If you have lots of budget data to set up in SpendMap, you can import your budgets rather than keying in the details manually…
– PURCHASING > Utility > Data Interfaces > Cost Center master file > Budgets > Import Budgets into cost center master file

More Details

For more information, please see the subsection called “About cost center budgets” at the top of this section of the Online Help..
– PURCHASING > Setup system > Cost center history/budget settings