Track and manage your spend effortlessly in iCompleat

Budgets in iCompleat make it effortless to track and manage your spending, letting you wave goodbye to pesky spreadsheets for good.

Whether it’s for keeping track of your financial budgets in line with corporate requirements, or simply tracking and monitoring spend for certain projects or activities, iCompleat’s budgeting tool covers the needs of every kind of budget holder.

 

 

An iCompleat budget takes just seconds to set up, but can simplify your future spend forecasting, help you record the variance between your planned spend and actual spend, and identify habits that are making you miss your spending targets.

• Track spending in your dedicated Budgets hub.
• Monitor budgets over a period of time, or choose a continuous activity-based insight.
• Get notifications when budgets are about to hit their limit.
• Share budgets with your team.
• See real-time spending data in the Budget Analysis report.

 

How do budgets work?

Budget criteria

To set up criteria for a budget, you can use analysis fields cached from your accounting software, or create custom analysis fields directly within the budgeting tool. For example, you might want to create a budget for all invoices received that use Euro or USD as the currency, or are coded to a particular project or supplier.

 

 

You can add secondary criteria items to make your budget more specific. For example, a budget might include all transactions that are coded to a particular department and site code. This is reflected within your budget in real time.

 

 

Your budget in action

When fully approved purchase orders or invoices contain lines that meet the analysis criteria for a budget, the value of those lines is deducted from the budget – including or excluding tax, depending on your preferences.

If coding is applied to the invoice at header level, the entire value of that invoice is deducted from the relevant budget.

 

 

Each budget you have access to appears in the Budgets hub within a tile, complete with an interactive graph with key information about the budget.

Any budgets that you create or have access to won't affect how transactions are processed in iCompleat, or influence non-budget-related reports or activities in iCompleat.

 

Sharing your budgets

You have the option to keep budgets private in your dedicated Budgets hub or share them with your team in iCompleat. Any budget that you share with other people will appear in their Budgets hub, and they will have access to its advanced data in the Budget Analysis report if they've been granted the additional permission in their main Compleat user profile.

 

 

An iCompleat Administrator in your team controls each user’s permission to view, edit and create budgets from within their user profiles, as well as their access to the Budget Analysis report. If you don’t see the Budgets tile on the iCompleat homepage or have access to the report, it may be because you haven’t been granted permission.

 

Understanding your budgets

For a more detailed insight into budgets, you can go to the dedicated Budget Analysis report, which lets you drill down to the specific transactions behind each budget and see its results in more detail.

 

 

If you’ve already created a budget and want to know more, skip to Managing your budgets. Otherwise, keep scrolling to learn about how to create and customise your first budget.

 

Get access to budgets

A Compleat administrator must grant you permission in your iCompleat user profile

 

 

To gain access to budgets other users have created, they must grant you access in the budget settings (see Create a budget below).

Create a budget

1. On the iCompleat homepage, click Budgets.
2. In the top-right, click Create new budget.

 

Step 1: Basic Details

 

You need to complete the fields in the Basic Details section before configuring your budget criteria. You can adjust the settings in this tab at any time after you save your budget.

In Basic Details you can input the following information:

 

What would you like to call your budget?	The budget name you enter appears on the budget in the Budgets hub. Any other users with access to your budget will see this too. The first letter of the budget name will appear in an icon against the budget in the Budgets hub.
What is the total value of your budget?	This is the exact amount you have in your budget. Type a budget value, or user the up and down arrows to adjust it.
Include tax in your budget?	Decide whether you’d like the tax value of items to be counted against the budget.
How do you like to round your budget?	If you'd like your budget to represent a more generalized amount spent, you can adjust the budget rounding option to suit your needs. When a transaction counts against the budget, Compleat will round it up to the next nearest figure according to the budget rounding option you've selected. Eg. If you choose to round by hundreds, a transaction totalling $36.50 will be rounded up to £100 in the budget. If you choose to round by thousands, a transaction totalling $1,525 will be rounded up to £2000 in the budget, and so on.
Budget Type	Choose to track your budget over a specific Period, or to continuously track the Activity of a budget without specifying a period. Further options appear when you select a Period budget (see below).
From / To (period budgets only)	Click the calendar icons to set a start and end date.
What periods of time shall we track your budget with?	Choose the time period iCompleat will use to track your budget. This determines how your budget’s data is presented in the graph in the Budget Analysis report. Your budget is automatically split evenly across your chosen time period (Eg. A $5,000 budget tracked quarterly will be split into $1,250 per quarter) but you can adjust these amounts by typing or using the up and down arrows.
Who can maintain and analyse the budget?	Choose whether you’d like to keep your budget private, allow everyone in your company to view and analyse it, or select specific people in iCompleat to view and analyse it.

 

When you’re happy with your budget’s basic details, click Save in the bottom-right.

 

 

Step 2: Budget Tracking

When you’ve completed and saved your budget's basic details, you can access the Budget Tracking options. This is how choose the analysis items that affect your budget.

 

Primary analysis item

You need to choose at least one primary analysis item for your budget to track. Line items or invoices that are coded to this primary analysis item and are fully approved will be counted against the budget.

Select the analysis item from the left-hand drop-down, and the code(s) from the other.

 

 

Secondary analysis item(s) (optional)

If you’d like iCompleat to track a primary analysis item and secondary analysis item(s), select codes from the Optional secondary analysis item(s) drop-down.

 

 

You can add multiple secondary analysis items to make your budget criteria as detailed as you need it to be.

Transactions that contain both your primary analysis item and all of the secondary analysis items will be counted against the budget. If you add multiple secondary analysis items to a budget and a transaction only contains the primary analysis item and just one secondary analysis item, it won’t be counted against the budget.

When you’re happy with your budget criteria, click Save in the bottom-right.

 

 

Step 3: Alerts

The Alerts tab is where you can configure the email alerts that iCompleat will send you if your budget is either approaching its total or has exceeded it.

 

You can choose who will receive the alerts as well as the frequency of them. For email alerts that notify you when a budget is approaching its total, you have the additional option to choose how close to your budget total you’ll start receiving alerts.

 

 

Alerts are switched off by default.

When you’re happy with your alerts settings, click Save in the bottom-right corner.

 

What now?

You just created your first budget! 🙌

Don’t stop there – add more budgets to get further insights into the spending across your company. There’s no limit to how many budgets you can create.

Now that you’ve created your budget, you’re probably desperate to see it in action. Your budget is now in your Budgets hub, which you can access from the iCompleat homepage.

Keep scrolling to get some top tips on analysing and understanding your budget.

 

Managing your budgets

All budgets that you have created or have access to can be found in your Budgets hub, which is accessible from the iCompleat homepage.

Each budget sits in its own tile containing its basic details and a graph, providing all of the information you to understand the status of your budget at a glance.

 

 

The red line on the graph indicates your budget total. The budget graph is split into these categories, which you can toggle on and off depending on the results you’d like to see:

• Soft commit - Unapproved POs (Saved POs not included)
• Hard commit - Approved POs (no receipt or invoice yet) and/or with a future delivery date) where receipting is not being used).
• Expensed - Approved invoices (includes both posted invoices and posting failures).
• Accrual - Unapproved invoices, receipted POs, and POs with a delivery date in the past (where receipting is not being used).

You can also see these budget details:

• Budget time period (if any)
• Budget spending so far
• Available budget balance
• Who created the budget
• When the budget was last refreshed to reflect any recent transactions.

 

Interact with your budget

Budget graphs are interactive, meaning you can switch the various components on and off to narrow down the graph results, as well as jump to the Budget Analysis report straight from the graph and see the advanced data behind your budget.

To switch a component of the graph on or off, click on one of the categories below the graph (Hard Commit, Soft Commit, Expensed, Accrual).

 

 

To jump to the Budget Analysis report and see the individual transactions making up one of those categories, click the relevant bar in the graph.

 

 

Edit, refresh or delete your budget

The burger menu in the top-right of each budget lets you edit, delete, refresh, or close the budget.

 

 

Clicking Edit lets you make changes to any of a budget's basic details, budget tracking selections and alert settings.

Clicking Delete triggers a popup asking you if you're sure you'd like to delete your budget.

Clicking Refresh updates the budget to include any recent transactions that might have been counted against the budget since the last automatic cache.

 

Close or re-open a budget

If you'd like to close a budget so that it freezes and is no longer visible in your budgets hub, click the dots in the top-right of a budget, and click Close.

You can view closed budgets by clicking the Closed budgets toggle in the top-left of your Budgets hub.

To re-open a closed budget, simply view your closed budgets, click the dots in the top-right of a closed budget, and click Re-open. The budget will appear in your main budgets hub and will start collecting data again.

 

 

 Still got questions? Comment below and let us know how we can improve this article.