How to fix common issues and entry mistakes with Budget Control Data Maintenance

Budget Control Data Maintenance is a few years old now but it isn't something that most folks are familiar with yet. Today I will answer common questions on how this works and what benefits it provides. We'll spend some time introducing this feature and walking through a few examples of common issues it resolves. 

Feature Overview

Budget control data maintenance was introduced to solve common data issues within budget control. The feature is designed to provide specific search criteria for accounting documents subject to budget control and reprocess the document to resolve a data inconsistency or re-check one that wasn't originally processed. The most common example is a situation where someone uploads the next year's budget before budget control is correctly configured for that year which results in the existence of a budget, but zero budget funds available to spend. 

Budget Control incomplete for a new year or account

Let's take a look at this common example. I am part of a public sector organization and I rely on budget control to prevent me from spending more than what I have budgeted. I am going to add a new general ledger account for my 2023 budget and skip part of the configuration.  Due to this misconfiguration budget control balances won't be accurate and it will appear that I have no budget funds available. Then we will come back and fix the problem with budget control data maintenance. 

We will start with entering a new 2023 budget amount. When I post the budget I won't see my green check mark indicating budget control was checked and I'll know something isn't right.

In the past this would mean that I would need to enter a negative budget to zero back out and try again. But instead we can use Budget control data maintenance to reprocess the budget transaction once I've fixed my setup issue. We'll navigate to budget control configuration and activate our draft setup. 

Budget control data maintenance in action

Next we'll open budget control data maintenance. We can provide a text description of what we're looking for and then need to set a number of parameters such as:

• Document from and to date to indicate what dates to search between
• Whether the document status is in a draft or confirmed state
• Select the scenario for what type of document or issue to look for

The select scenarios button will provide the details of what we're trying to fix. In our case we'll be using the budget register entries not checked scenario which will search the budget tables for any budget register entries between the dates selected and draft or confirmed status selected. It will then filter the results down to any budget register entries that were not checked for budget control but would now be subject to a budget check with the current configuration in place. 

You will receive back a list of documents that meet this criteria and you can select the documents that you want to process. You'll test this out in a test environment before production of course but the final process document step will perform an additional budget control check on the selected documents and properly track the budget in Dynamics. 

This feature saves the confusion and energy of having to add additional documents to work around this problem. We also get a great audit friendly log of what documents were found and what changes were made. 

Additional scenario: Carry-forward

There is a budget control configuration option for maintain carry-forward. This configuration ensures that any edits made to a carry-forward budget controlled document will not lose its carry-forward status. In layman's terms, an organization will be able to use the amount allocated from the previous years budget rather than consume current year budget. Without this configuration option marked there were several processes that would inconsistently remove the carry-forward flag on purchase orders, purchase requisitions, or relieving documents. Budget control data maintenance can be run on any documents after this configuration is enabled to ensure any existing documents inherit the carry-forward designation. 

Additional scenario: Source document reprocessing provider

Looking back at our example for budget, we can have the same sort of issues for downstream documents consuming budget. Let's walk through a similar example with added complexity. In this case we have actuals booked to an account that was never flagged for budget control. This example has a 2024 budget register entry with a purchase order and invoice consuming budget all without budget control enabled. We can reprocess the budget like before and then through an additional check for PO and Invoices to reconcile the budget with what has been spent. 

Let's take this one from reverse and look at the end result of what budget control statistics shows once all of the documents are processed:

What we see is I have $10,000 budget funds available from the results of a $20,000 budget entry, a $10,000 purchase order, and $2,500 invoiced from the PO. This shows $2,500 of actual spend and another $7,500 remaining of the PO where we have the commitment to spend but haven't actually spent the dollars yet. 

To get to this point, we had first run the budget register entries not checked scenario like we did in the earlier example. Next we ran the source document reprocessing scenario. 

The big thing to call out here is that ween we do the source document reprocessing you are prompted to pick the filter for individual documents. This is not wide open finding everything that could possibly be found. You pick the sub-scenario as shown above and then it requires you to put in the actual purchase order number in this case. 

The purchase order scenario does pick up invoices attached to the PO. Your results look like what I have shown below. Note that the document by document search is a pretty big caveat to be aware of. So if you have to fix multiple documents then this will take some effort. 

Call to action

Thank you for joining me today! When using budget control you now have an additional tool in the toolbox to fix common mistakes. You can read a full description of the different scenarios available in the table below.