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Best Practice for Gathering Budget Information

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Posted on by CU03101700-0

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I am looking for suggestions on the best way to gather reporting information for various stakeholders in departments. Our organization managers rely heavily on budgets, encumbrances and vendor invoicing for making business decisions (pretty typical) but the pain for them is that includes too many mouse clicks and places to have to join the information together like a puzzle. Ideally, whether directly in D365 or PowerBI we would like to run a report that takes a couple of variables in our financial dimension (department and account number) and display budget amount, encumbrance, invoiced amount. Are there various entities that we can combine to get that information?

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Dynamics 365 Finance

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Deepak Agarwal 8,912 on at

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Reporting is one of most complicated discussion, not from technology but more from what is needed and why.

There can not be one answer to your question, I would suggest to list all report , source and use of each. Than you can explore where each can fit in. Also dont expect everything will fit into one tool. BPP and BPA are great tools from Microsoft solve many problems and Power can support them for any bespoke reports.

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CU03101700-0 331 on at

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So I thought maybe using the budget control statistics report would be a solution, however, it only provides 40% of what is needed. Users are interested in seeing the detail of the PO and Vendor Invoices that have been entered and that's where the report falls short. Even going to actual expenditures for example, it doesn't show the actual invoices but gives you transaction amounts and not who or the invoice associated with the transaction number.

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Giorgio Bonacorsi 3,024 on at

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Hello,

Usually, the budget planning process is handled outside of D365FO, while budget control is managed directly inside the system.
You can also perform the entire budget planning process inside D365FO, but it can be quite complex depending on the organization’s requirements. You can find a good architectural explanation here: https://dax365fo.org/2024/02/22/budget-solution-landscape/
Another alternative is to use Business Performance Planning (BPP).

Regarding budget control, the first and most important inquiry is usually the Actual vs Budget report. This allows you to track the evolution of the business compared to what was planned.
If you need to reorganize or customize your inquiries, you can also use Financial Reports or the reports available in Business Performance Analytics (BPA).

Thank you,

Giorgio

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Rashid.Ali 376 on at

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Hi,

Use Financial Reporter for a fully standard solution combining budget, actuals, and encumbrances by financial dimensions. Additionally, you can also use the Actual vs Budget report available (Budgeting > Inquiries and Reports > Basic Budgeting > Actual vs Budget) for a quick comparison.

Encumbrance data is only reliable when budget control is properly enabled and configured.

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Arvind Bharti 841 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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If you are planning to use report to identify this, then best is use of budget transactions entries because that gives all budgted and actual posted at transactions level with all granular details which you can use based on your requirement in report.

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CU03101700-0 331 on at

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The suggestions are helpful in getting the overall information but the users want to be able to drill down on the encumbrance amount and see the invoice and drill down further and see the line items. I haven't been able to find a way that allows that amount of detail information.

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