Introduction
Typically, you perform budget planning when you're preparing the budgets that an organization will implement. An organization can configure budget planning, and then set up budget planning processes to meet its policies, procedures, and requirements for budget preparation.
You need to be familiar with the following terms in budget planning in Dynamics 365 Finance.
Budget planning processes - Budget planning processes determine how budget plans can be updated, routed, reviewed, and approved in the budgeting organization hierarchy. A budget planning process is linked to a budget cycle and an organization through a legal entity.
Budget plans - Budget plans contain the budget data for a budget planning process. You can have multiple budget plans that are used for various purposes. For example, budget plans can be used to create budget amounts for different organizational units, or they can help you make comparisons and informed decisions.
Budget plan scenarios - Budget plan scenarios define categories of data for the budget plans. You can define budget plan scenarios to support monetary and other unit of measure classes, such as quantity. Examples of monetary budget plan scenarios include Department previous year and Department requests. Examples of budget plan scenarios that use quantities include Previous year support calls and Full-time equivalent (FTE) count.
Budget planning stages - Budget planning stages define the steps that a budget plan follows from its inception to final approval. Budget planning stages are arranged in budget planning workflows.
Budget planning workflows - Budget planning workflows consist of and define budget planning stages. Budget planning workflows are associated with Budgeting workflows. Budgeting workflows are the automated and manual processes that move budget plans through the budget planning stages.
You can use budget planning to perform the following tasks.
Create budget plans to define the expected revenues and expenditures for a budget planning process.
Analyze and update budget plans for multiple scenarios.
Route the budget plans automatically, together with worksheets, justification documents, and other attachments, for review and approval.
Consolidate multiple budget plans from a lower level of the organization into a single parent budget plan at a higher level of the organization. You can also develop a single budget plan at a higher level of the organization and allocate the budget to lower levels of the organization.
Budget planning is integrated with other Dynamics 365 Finance modules. Therefore, you can bring in information from previous budgets, actual expenditures, fixed assets, and human resources.
Because budget planning is also integrated with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, you can use these programs to work with budget planning data. For example, a budget manager can export a department's budget request from a budget plan scenario into an Excel worksheet. The data can be analyzed, updated, and charted in the worksheet, and then published back to the budget plan lines.