Initiative Templates

What Are Initiative Templates and How Are They Used

Initiatives are discretionary items, which you can budget separately from other organizational budgets. Initiatives organize and describe proposed costs changes to allow budget decisions to be made. Create initiatives for revenues, expenses, and capital expenditures. Use this page to add or edit initiatives.

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

• 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.

On the Panning Control Panel, select the Initiative template you want to add initiatives to.

When you open the template in Input mode, it will be blank if no initiatives exist.

How to Add an Initiative and Start Budgeting for that Initiative

1. Open an Initiative template from the Planning Control Panel in Input mode.

2. Click the Add button to add an initiative.

3. Enter a code and name to identify the initiative.

4. Complete all attribute fields, which vary based on your setup.

5. Click Save. The initiative, called Cake Baking, is added as shown below.

   

6. To bake the cake, lets say you need to hire temporary employees. To log expenses for the temporary employees against an account, select the initiative line and click Sub Template > Expenses.

7. The sub template is empty because you need to load accounts your Admin associated with this template. Click Accounts > Load Account. Notice the Expenses sub template below with the Temp Services account loaded.

   

8. Enter expenses / cost for the temporary employees by month as shown below and then click Save.

   

9. Click the back arrow to return to the Initiative Input page.

10. 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.

11. Click Accounts > Load Account to load accounts that 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.

    

12. Enter revenue in the cells by month and click Save.

13. Click the back arrow to return to the Initiative Input page.

14. Notice the Revenues and Expenses columns are updated based on sub template input as shown below.

Optionally, load assets to initiatives you create. To do so, click Sub Template and select Assets. Then, load assets based on their category. For example, all cars, trucks, and motorcycles are under the vehicles category.

Initiative Workflow

Once the initiative is complete, return to the Planning Control Panel, ensure the initiative template is selected and click Mark Complete. You (or whomever your Admin provided approval privileges to) can now perform entity approval actions. The table below describes each of these actions.

Hover over Initiative templates to view the current state as shown below.

Initiative Reports

View reports on initiatives by chart of account segment or by category. Both reports can be launched from the Initiative Input template page.