Initiative Planning

Initiative Planning consolidates the financial information, the supporting justification, and the statement of impact for a specific request for implementation in the budget. Requests for resources, new services and programs, additional equipment and vehicles, and capital items can be generated.

Initiatives organize and describe proposed costs changes to allow budget decisions to be made. Initiative budgeting allows you to:

• Budget for discretionary items (resources, equipment or capital items) separately from other organizational budgets;
• Consolidate financial information;
• Provide supporting justification information for proposed initiatives;
• Track impact details.

Initiative templates are subjected to a workflow approval process. Once initiatives are approved, they are rolled up to a final budget or forecast.

To set up Initiative Planning, you will need to:

This is only an overview of the steps. How to complete each step is described in detail in the topics below.

1. Add an Initiative type template on the Template List page.
2. Create Categories on the Line Item Category page.
3. Set up Approval Roles for the new template.
4. Set up Categories.
5. Perform Template Setup (design).
6. Set up Attributes to Map to Initiatives.
7. Map Initiative Template to Scenarios and Budget Entities (to make them available in the Planning Control Panel)

Input Data via Planning Control Panel

Now that template setup is complete, you assigned the template to a budget entity, provided approval role privileges, and mapped the template to a scenario, open the template via the Planning Control Panel. Select the scenario you mapped the template to and the entity you mapped on the Entity Mapping page. The template is displayed as shown below.

Open the template in Input mode, the template is blank.

How to Input Data to Initiative Template?

1. Navigate to Structured Planning to open the Planning Control Panel 
2. Select a template and click Input
3. On the Initiative template Input page click the Add button to add an initiative.
4. Enter a code and name to identify the initiative.
5. Complete all attribute fields, which vary based on your setup.
6. Click Save. The initiative, called Cake Baking, is added as shown below.
   
7. To bake the cake, you need to hire temporary employees to help. To log expenses for these employees against an account, select the initiative line and click Sub Template > Expenses.
   
8. The sub template is empty because you need to load accounts associated with this template (mapped when you set up Categories). Click Accounts > Load Account. Notice the Expenses sub template below with the Temp Services account loaded.
   
9. Enter expenses / cost for the temporary employees by month as shown below and then click Save.
   
10. Click the back arrow to return to the Initiative Input page.
11. Now that the cake is done baking, you sell the cake. To enter money made from the sale, select the Cake Baking initiative and click Sub Template > Revenues.
12. Click Accounts> Load Account to load accounts the revenue amounts entered on the sub template will post to. In this example, the Gross Sales account is selected for the Cake Baking initiative and MFG (manufacturing entity) as shown below.
13. Enter revenue in the cells by month and click Save.
14. Click the back arrow to return to the Initiative Input page. Notice the Revenues and Expenses columns are updated based on sub template input as shown below.
    

Adding Assets to Initiatives

Assets can be added to an initiative for budgeting purposes. Under Sub Template, select Assets and then load assets based on the assigned category. Assets and asset categories added via Capital Planning are available. For detailed information on assets, asset categories, and finance modes, see Capital Planning.

Initiative Workflow

Once the initiative is complete, return to the Planning Control Panel, ensure the initiative template is selected and click Mark Complete. You can now perform entity approval actions. The section below describes each of these actions.