Hi. In this video, you'll learn about the Budget Process Owner tasks of creating a plan, adjusting baselines, setting and publishing targets, and opening a plan.

At the beginning of the planning process, the Budget Process Owner (BPO):

• Creates a plan or a forecast
• Adjusts the baseline amounts in the plan
• Sets and publish target numbers for the plan, and
• Opens the plan

In this video, we'll look at these tasks in more detail.

First, let’s create a plan.

Click the Create Plan option from the Plan menu to display the Create Plan dialog box. In this dialog box, you are prompted to provide the information needed for the new plan.

To create a budget, select Budget as the Plan Type, specify the Plan Start Year i.e., the fiscal year followed by selecting the length of your plan. IT Planning allows you to create up to 6-year plans, which enables you to configure time periods, save layouts to create multi-year views, and view the financial impact of projected labor resources, contracts, and assets over multiple years.

Next, if you want to baseline your budget off an existing budget, click the Baseline drop down and select a budget from the list. If you choose None, you will start with a blank budget.

Finally, you give the plan a name and click Create.

To create a forecast, you select the Forecast option in the Create Plan dialog box.

Note that the actuals data has to be uploaded before you can open a new forecast. To do so, you need to go to the Spend Management module, select the month you want to import the data to, and then select Import Actuals from the Actions menu to import a .csv file. If you are a Budget Owner, you can export transactions data at any level in the Cost Object hierarchy. 

If you have IT Planning integrated with Cost Transparency, you'll see the Import from Cost Transparency button here.

Once a plan (either a budget OR a forecast) is created, you can adjust the baseline amounts. These adjustments can only be made by a Budget Process Owner while the plan is in the NEW state.

In the Expenses view of your plan, click the OTHER tab and then the Actions menu drop down to select Adjust Amounts. The Adjust Amounts dialog box is displayed. The Adjust Amounts dialog box has options to globally set percentage base adjustments or an absolute amount to one or more cost objects. For example, if you know that you need to add 10% to the budget, you can apply that to all departments and to a specific account.

Next, use the Period Range to indicate the start and end dates of your adjustment and click Adjust.

You can also make adjustments by simply editing the plan in the Expenses view or exporting the plan to a CSV file, use an outside tool like Excel to modify the numbers, and then use import file option to bring that new data in. All of this is done in the New state, so that you can get the plan set as needed prior to opening it to your plan owners.

The next task to consider before opening your plan is setting Targets.

You can set targets for the various departments, projects, and their groups. The targets are displayed in the KPIs on Summary view reports.

To set or modify a Target, select the Targets menu. Confirm that you are setting targets for the cost object you intend. In the Target column, enter individual cost center targets in their respective rows.

As soon as you enter a new target value, the REMAINDER value in the first row of the table gets updated. Once you’ve set high level department targets, you can move down the hierarchy adding or editing targets as needed.

Once you are done setting the targets, click Publish Targets. The targets appear on the Summary view for each department and can help plan owners quickly see if they are over or under the target set.

Once you have completed the baseline adjustments, set and published the targets, you are ready to click Open Plan.

You can also update the reference data in an Open plan. Note that the following updates to Reference Data are supported in an Open plan:

• Create leaf cost objects
• Create custom dimensions
• Add or modify dimension attributes
• Add values to a dimension

IT Planning will prevent updates to Reference Data that are destructive or would otherwise impact financial totals in an Open plan. You will have to create a new plan to implement the following Reference Data changes in an Open plan:

• Removing Cost Object or Dimension values
• Deleting or modifying existing allocation rules for Labor, Contracts or Assets
• Changing parent code for any Cost Object, and
• Modifying or removing relationships between Cost Object and Cost Centers

When a plan is opened, plan owners receive an email notification that the plan is open.

In this video, you learned about the Budget Process Owner tasks of creating a plan, adjusting baselines, setting and publishing targets, and opening a plan. Thanks for watching!