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How to create a Budget Category
Updated over 2 weeks ago

The following article pertains to our new Budgets. See this article for how to identify which version of budgets your domain is currently using.

In this article, we refer to “Location” and “Department”. Your domain may have different labels due to custom organizational categories. Learn more here.


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Budget categories allow you to track the spending of locations, departments, account codes, or a combination thereof, against a budget. Budget categories can also be created without a budget for you to create visibility to monitor spending.

Summary Spend vs Periodic Spend

Our new Budgets can be used to track both Summary Spend and Periodic Spend. A Summary Budget Category provides a overview of the complete spend/budget, whereas a Periodic Budget Category will show a detailed breakdown of month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter spend of a complete spend/budget.

Creating a Budget Category to View Summary Spend

Budget Categories can be created to view spending against budget over a complete time frame, whether your organization defines budgets on an annual, funding series, or another fiscal basis. A Budget Category for Summary Spend will provide an overview of this spend/budget.

  1. Navigate to Settings Manage Budget Categories under Finance.

  2. Click + Add Category.

  3. Enter a name for the Budget Category and select the relevant Departments and Account Codes. (You may select a combination of multiple Departments and/or Account Codes.)

  4. Grant viewing permissions to Approvers and Superusers to view this Budget Category by using the Give Viewing Access To field. These approvers will have the ability to view this Budget Category on their dashboard and during approvals.

  5. Use the checkbox to mark whether this budget is a Source of Truth.

  6. If you would like to assign a budget click Set a Budget for each date range checkbox. It is not necessary to input a Budget if you only wish to track spending.

    • If the budget is different for each period of this date range, select Customize budget for each period to enter in budget for each period.

  7. Enter the date range(s) appropriate for this Budget Category and the budget for each period within this date range.

    The example above will create a budget category of $200,000 for the 2023 calendar year.

  8. Once all the appropriate fields have been filled in, select Create.

Creating a Budget Category to View Periodic Spend

Budget Categories can be created to view periodic spending against budget within a complete time frame. A Budget Category for Periodic Spend will provide insight into the monthly or quarterly spend.

Navigate to Settings Manage Budget Categories under Finance.

  1. Click + Add Category.

  2. Enter a name for the Budget Category. We recommend omitting references to time periods for Periodic Budget Categories.

  3. Select the relevant Departments and Account Codes. (You may select a combination of multiple Departments and/or Account Codes.)

  4. Grant viewing permissions to Approvers to view this Budget Category by using the Give Viewing Access To field. These approvers will have the ability to view this Budget Category on their dashboard and during approvals.

  5. Use the checkbox to mark whether this budget is a Source of Truth.

  6. If you would like to assign a budget click Set a Budget for each date range checkbox. It is not necessary to input a Budget if you only wish to track spending.

    • If the budget is different for each period of this date range, select Customize budget for each period to enter in budget amounts for each period.

  7. Enter the date range(s) appropriate for this Budget Category and the budget for each period within this date range.

    The example above will create a budget of $7,500 for each quarter in 2023.

  8. Once all the appropriate fields have been filled in, select Create.

Viewing Budget Categories in the Dashboard and Approvals

Users with Viewing Access can view the Spend Tracker:

  • on their Procurify Dashboard

  • during approvals to consider the impact of requests against budgets

Source of Truth

The sum of all Source of Truth Budgets should equal the total budget defined by your organization.

Ensure to not select the Source of Truth checkbox if the Budget Category is generated as an extra measure of tracking spend.

This functionality helps you identify which budgets are crucial for reporting at an organizational level.

An example:

  • A Budget Category for tracking the spend of the Marketing department in 2023 is a Source of Truth.

  • A Budget Category to track the spend for a Marketing outreach event in November 2023 is not a Source of Truth, as it is already accounted for within the Budget Category created above.

Additional Information:

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