Budget planning in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations one version part II

Budget planning in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations one version

In earlier blog / part I, we covered key setup and configuration needed for enabling budget planning in D365FO

In this blog we would cover execution of steps to use budget planning.

There are quite some options of generating a budget plan:

• Manually create
• Automatically from another budget plan
• Automatically from general ledger
• Etc.

We would use a scenario wherein a top down and bottom up budget planning process is configured to work out budget numbers amongst department and later reviewed by finance.

We would use few monetary information already available in D365FO as our starting point:

• Actuals posted to ledger for previous year and previous to previous
• Budget plan approved for previous year
• If needed current year actuals could also be combined with other options.

Let us start by first creating our top level budget plan at finance department by populating it with previous to previous year posted values. This plan would be referred as parent plan.

Note the usage of historical to reflect past values which we would need to reset the budget plan to be able to use further.

The previous to previous year actuals is stored in scenarios PPY actuals a shown below

Once the parent plan is reset it becomes available to populate other values.

We would use the same parent plan and this time populate it with last year actuals as shown below.

Once the generation / updation process is completed, the PY actuals scenario would be populated with monetary information from general ledger

We would then populate in the parent plan, approved budget numbers for previous year using the option of generate plan from plan as shown below.

When the previous year budget scenario is populated we can take it to form our basis for current year starting numbers.

To do it, we would add 15% to previous year budgeted and create baseline for this year. This is achieved by selecting budget plan lines and then clicking on allocate budget button.

Once allocation routine finish updating we can review the baseline numbers which is our guidance for current year.

Once the budgeting office/finance department which is the topmost level in the budget plan organization hierarchy feels comfortable with baseline the parent plan can now be submitted to workflow to generate plans for other operating units also known as child plans.

You can review the status of the parent plan workflow and review execution of various workflow activities.

When all the child plans are auto created using the wo9rkflow, D365FO would use the stage allocation to trigger allocations to populate data in those child plans.

The parent plan or the budget planning process could be used to track progress using budget plan hierarchy as shown below

Based on the workflow setup the child plans gets routed to approval.

We are taking example of sales & marketing department level child plan to review what was baseline and what we are requesting for current year.

When all child plans are submitted, the parent plan can roll up the requested numbers by completing the review step of parent plan workflow.

Typically we use stage allocations to aggregate at this juncture.

Upon aggregation the information can be reviewed as shown below 

Once all the necessary approval step on parent plan is performed the plan gets updated with approved as the final workflow status.

This plan is now our budget plan for current year and can be used to create budget register entry or directly use in Financial reports for variance analysis.

Happy D365FO