Overview
Budget Control Rules provides a mechanism to specify a series of rules that taken together provide definition of the expenditure and costs that the business wants to apply spend control to.
Each rule will contain specific GL main account and / or financial dimension selection criteria, together with associated rule properties that together specify the rules for sourcing financing budget and actual values, who has budget management responsibility and the threshold beyond which budget control warning messages should be triggered for the expenditure type etc covered by the rule.
The screenshot below shows rule setup for selling expenses and training expenses to provide simple straight forward examples for illustration. The criteria within these rules could be further extended to cover specific business unit and / or department financial dimension values, if for example budget control on training costs is to be applied to specific business units and / or departments or where budget management responsibilities or thresholds differ for training costs by business unit and / or department.
The following should be taken into consideration when planning and specifying Budget Control Rule setup requirement detail …
- Dimensions – the dimensions used in a budget control rule criteria, including ‘main account’ must be within the scope of those dimensions specified as ‘budget control dimensions’ in budget control parameters setup
- Account Structure and Dimension Values – the criteria specified for each budget control rule must fit within the boundaries of the GL Account Structure and Financial Dimensions previously specified for Budget Control setup. For example, any GL main accounts specified within a budget control rule criteria (e.g. main accounts in the range 601200 to 601400 show in the criteria in the screenshot below) , also need to fall within the criteria specified for the budget control assigned GL account structure.
- Rule Criteria Conflicts – criteria in two or more rules that cover the same financial dimensions are not allowed.
Budget Control Properties
These settings are specific to each Budget Control Rule created and supersede the same baseline, budget control parameter settings
- Budget Control Interval – defines the period length of a budget cycle. Options include accounting year, financial period, month, quarter
- Budget Cycle Time Span –
- Budget Manager – nominated individual with budget management responsibilities specific to the specified budget control rule. The role of budget manager and as a result the employee specified, will be available for related workflow (e.g. purchase order) task and/or approval assignment in the event of a budget control breach.
- Budget Threshold – defines the percentage of total budget spent beyond which early warning budget control messages should be triggered and optionally displayed, specifically for the specified budget control rule.
Further Reading
Further information on Dynamics 365 Basic Budgeting and Budget Control is available on the Microsoft Docs and Learn Docs sites via the URLs below and should help to provide further background and context to aid survey question completion.
Budget control overview – Finance | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Docs