Field descriptions: Spend Management

Select the budget that Spend Management validates against. Budgets need to have amounts entered for the GL account and dimension combinations you want to include in validation for the period of time you choose to enforce spend controls.

Consolidated budgets cannot be used with Spend Management because consolidated budgets are in a single currency for all entities, but Spend Management validates against the base currency of each entity. Instead, you can create a single budget for all entities so that it validates against each entity's base currency appropriately.

This budget doesn't have to be the same budget you use in reporting. Instead, you can use a threshold budget that's based on a percentage of your usual company budget to receive warnings before you hit your actual budget overage.

Select a start date to tell Spend Management when exactly to begin expense validation.

Use the start date of a period that is set up to be used for budgeting. This ensures that periods cannot overlap and do not conflict.

Select this checkbox to enforce validation in transactions that don't match any account-dimension combinations for the budget period being validated.

When enabled, if a budget has no match, Spend Management validates the transaction as if it has a budget of £0.00. For instance, if there isn’t a budgeted amount for that period for the location and department combination included in the transaction, then Spend Management will treat this combination as having a budget of £0.00 and triggers the stop or warn notification when it's submitted.

If this feature is disabled, transactions without matching account-dimension combinations will be submitted or posted without being validated.

Select this checkbox if you want to receive email notifications on budget overages that occur during a set time interval.

Email notifications are only sent on those transactions which result in a budget overage. For example, if Purchasing is configured to stop if the specified budget is exceeded, but Accounts Payable is configured to warn, then you will only receive email notifications on budget overages related to your AP purchase invoices because the system will prevent any transactions that exceed the budget if posted in Purchasing.

Enter the valid email address of the person you want to receive the budget overage notifications. Only one email address can be entered.

The person who receives the budget overage notifications should be someone who can make budget decisions and/or adjust the budget in Sage Intacct as needed.

Choose how often you want to receive budget overage alerts. Your choices include:

• Days
• Weeks
• Months

Be sure to select a notification preference that is easy to read and doesn't overwhelm the email. For instance, if you at first receive monthly notifications that have too many table rows, switch your preference to a more frequent option, like weekly or daily.

Select the dimensions that should be included when spending is validated. Dimension validation is optional, but if you have selected dimensions, then Spend Management validation requires your transactions in each application you select to track and enforce all selected dimensions.

Spend Management uses the dimensions that you define on the Purchasing configuration, Accounts Payable, and the General Ledger configuration pages.

Be sure the dimensions you select here are enabled in every application you select as well.

In addition to the start date, you need to define the time interval under which Spend Management validates the budget. Select that period that matches how your budget was created to validate expenditures:

• Current month: Validate expenses for the month based only on the budget for that month.
• Current year: Validate expenses based on the total budget for the year.
• Current year through current month: Validate expenses based on the year-to-date budget for the current year, up to and including the end of the current month.
• Fiscal current year: For companies that don't use the calendar year but use a fiscal year, Spend Management can validate for the budget total of the fiscal year.
• Fiscal year through current month: For companies that don't use the calendar year but use a fiscal year, Spend Management can validate the fiscal year budget from the start of the year through the end of the current month.

This option can only appears if you have selected the Project dimension to be included in your validated dimensions.

When enabled, the project begin and end dates defined in the project related to the transaction submitted are used to validate the budget. If no project begin and end date is available, the Default duration is used instead.

Enabling this option also prevents transactions from being posted if the transactions don't align with the defined begin and end dates. This can be helpful if you want to ensure that project costs are entered during the project's valid dates, not before or after.

Validate Purchasing, Validate Accounts Payable, and Validate General Ledger

Select a checkbox besides an application option to enable validation in that application and its transactions.

Further setup, as described in the Purchasing section, is required if you choose to Validate Purchasing.

Choose the validation behavior on budget overages:

• Stop: prevents transactions from being submitted or posted that would exceed the budget. To move forward with these transactions, adjust the amount of the transaction to be within the budget parameters or place the transaction in Draft mode until your budget administrator can adjust the budget. Otherwise, these transactions cannot be posted.
• Warn: warns users when they are going to submit or post a transaction that will exceed the budget. Users can either put the transaction in Draft mode, then talk to the budget administrator about how to handle the budget overage, or they can submit or post the transaction anyway, which will be included in the budget overage notification emails sent to the budget administrator if you have configured that option.
  If your GL journal entry imports fail due to over budget warnings, select the Ignore Warnings checkbox in the import window before you import any transactions.

These control options are independent for each application selected to offer flexibility based on the type of transactions.

Select a specific account group that holds all the accounts in your budget you want to validate in your GL transactions. For example, you might make an account group for your expenses or capital purchases and choose it here.

Learn more about Add an account group.

Select this checkbox to Include committed expenses in your available budget calculations. Committed expenses are used to reserve a portion of the budget for planned obligations such as supplier contracts or other purchases. The amounts can be directly entered into a user-defined book or they can be generated from Purchasing transactions.

Select the user-defined books that contain the committed expenditures entries.

Select the types of transaction definition documents in Purchasing to validate the budget actuals against.

Spend Management validation doesn't support returns and generally recommends avoiding the use of negative amounts, which will naturally pass through the spending validation and purchase requisition documents. Transaction definitions that use the workflow category Return do not appear in the selection list.

If a negative number is used in a transaction, the number is added to the budget rather than counted against it, so the transaction will automatically pass validation.

Items that use non-posting transaction definitions do not include a mapping configuration that maps Item GL groups to GL accounts to which they post.

To validate spending transactions based on items, you must tell Spend Management what area of the budget (GL group account) the transaction is budgeted against because it's not explained by the transaction definition during processing.

As a catch-all, assign a default group account for expenditures. The best practice is to map your GL accounts for all item GL groups individually first and set the default to an account with a zero budget.

For item GL groups on purchase transactions, define the General Ledger account associated with the item. For multi-entity companies, you'll see the entity that created the GL group.

Include the item GL group and GL account for all items to be validated. Select from the list of Income Statement accounts and Balance Sheet accounts.

You can also CSV import: Item GL groups to GL accountsto save time by selecting Import mapping.