Audience: Neo1 Admins


Purpose

In this article, we will discuss the Budget module. Neo1 has built in pre-approval capabilities called Budgets. Budgets can be used for multiple scenarios and could be based on the type of company you are. 

Some examples include:

  • Managing budgets for customer projects. Set a budget for project expenditure that your customer has agreed to and track expenses against this budget across multiple team members
  • Pre-authorizing spend for external contractors and matching the invoice to the budget, streamlining reconciliation.
  • Setting departmental budgets across the business, tagging the team members in that department, and allowing them to call off the budget incrementally as they purchase.


The key things to remember about budgets are:

  1. Budgets have a maximum amount. If you try to tag a transaction against a budget which has reached its limit we will track overspend but the transaction will not be automatically approved. Neo1 will route this transaction to the required approvers.
  2. Budgets have an expiry date. When you create a budget a 1 month expiry is defaulted. After this date, new transactions can be longer be tagged to the budget. Set an appropriate expiry date for when you expect to incur spend. 
  3. If you tag a transaction against a budget which is in date (valid) and has budget remaining, the transaction will automatically be approved when submitted to speed up the reconciliation process. Note: if the transaction breaches any spend policy, then this will still be routed to the supervisor for approval. 
  4. Budgets have Members. Use this to tag other employees in the business who have access to the budget. These users can then see the Budget in their own Neo1 account and tag transactions against it.



Overview


Creating a new Budget

Budgets have their own module, you can find it on the main menu on the left hand side:



This screen will show you current budgets you own, or have been tagged in to have access to incur spend against. 




To create a new Budget, click Request and complete the Create Budget window. Complete the Name, tag Members, Purpose, End Date and Amount. Optionally complete the Merchant and Order Number if you know where you will be spending. When finished, click Create.



Tip: You can also pre-select coding on this screen, where applicable, for your setup (optional).



Your budget will now show in draft mode. Click on Submit to send this for pre-approval to the applicable approvers, or Edit to make any changes before you send. 



Your budget will now show in Draft mode. Click on Submit to send this for pre-approval to the applicable approvers, or Edit to make any changes before you send. Once submitted it will show as Waiting for Pre-approval until approved, and once approved you will receive an email notification.


Tagging transactions to a Budget

The advantage of working with budgets means you can speed up the process of reconciling spend. When working with a transaction, you can pull down the Budgets tab to reveal the active budgets available to you:


On submitting this transaction:


  • If the value of the transaction is within the available budget, the transaction will be automatically post-approved and routed to finance for Review. 
  • If this value is higher than the amount available in the budget, or the transaction breaches an established spend policy, the transaction will be tagged against the budget however post-approval will still be required.


Tracking spend against a Budget

You can track spend against a budget from the Budgets module. In this example, our spend item has been submitted showing this budget has been fully used. You can click View for more information and see the transactions that have been tagged against the budget. 




For Admins and Supervisors: 

Managing Team and Company Budgets

If you are a Supervisor of other users, a Finance User for an Admin User, you can see the status of all budgets within the Authorize View (if you are a supervisor, you will see your teams budgets)

Click Authorize, Budgets to see the status of all budgets, including any which are currently pending approval with either yourself or other approvers.



From here you can:

  • Click View to see more details of the budget, including linked transactions
  • Click Close to end this budget. You will remove the Budget from the users view, and place this into the Budget Spend Summary report.
    • Note: When you close a budget where tagged transactions are still in the Neo1 workflow, you will be warned that these transactions will be sent back to the user for resubmission as the budget is no longer available for tagging.


Budget Reporting

Neo1 has a dedicated report for Budgets that have been closed, where this data will be stored for the 7 years in our archive database. This report is accessible in Reports > Pre-Spend Reports > Budget Spend Summary