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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Budget Check

Setup Considerations: Budget Check

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of budget check. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Budget check functionality in Workday automatically checks your transactions against your financial plans and position budgets. Workday handles over-budget transactions by either:
  • Warning you that the transaction exceeds the available budget and will fail budget check.
  • Skipping budget check. The transaction displays the budget check status as
    Not Required
    .
  • Automatically passing the transaction. The transaction displays the budget check status as
    Pass
    .
When a transaction passes budget check, it also displays the budget check status as
Pass.

Business Benefits

You can help your organization:
  • Use their funds efficiently.
  • Ensure that you don't run out of budget during your fiscal period.
  • Reduce manual effort in handling over-budget transactions.

Use Cases

You can use budget check to:
  • Control transactions against award budgets to restrict spending to the products and services your sponsors allow.
  • Make hiring decisions based on your available budget after checking staffing transactions.
  • Enable budget check reviewers to request overrides and authorized approvers to grant those overrides.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
How strictly do you want to enforce budget check?
You can configure budget check to handle over-budget transactions by:
  • Preventing the transactions from passing until you revise them or amend the plan or budget.
  • Using tolerance amounts so that your transaction only fails when it exceeds the tolerance amount over the budget. When your transaction exceeds the budget by less than the tolerance amount, Workday warns you, but allows it to pass.
  • Automatically passing a transaction even when it's over-budget.
  • Skipping checking a transaction even when the transaction would have failed budget check.
How should you configure budget check for budgets in a virtual parent-child relationship?
You can configure budget check to restrict overspending on either the parent, child, or both levels. Example: You configure budget check to restrict overspending on the parent level while having a more lenient configuration on the child level. Over-budget transactions on the child level will pass as long as they don't exceed the budget sum on the parent.
How do you want to handle credit transactions?
You can configure budget check to pass the transaction automatically. Your transaction fails budget check with a
Fail - Insufficient Budget
 status when:
  • Your transaction exceeds your budget.
  • You don't configure this option.
When should you include reserved journals in budget check?
You can include reserved journals in budget check to reserve funds for transactions that impact the same budget. Workday reserves these funds after a transaction passes budget check but before the business process completes by posting the journal. Workday doesn't automatically include reserved journals in budget check.
How can you determine when a transaction is subject to budget check?
When your budget has optional structured dimensions, Workday only checks the included dimension members and the rest of the dimension members on the transaction pass as
Not Required
. When the optional structured dimension is set to
Include All Members
, any dimension member on the transaction is subject to budget check.

Recommendations

Workday recommends that you:
  • Configure commitment accounting to track commitments, obligations, and actuals for spend authorization, procurement, and payroll transactions.
  • Use a more lenient budget check configuration on your child plans and budgets, and a strict configuration on your parent plan. You can configure Workday to warn you when your transaction is over the child-level budget and block overspending on the parent level.

Requirements

For Workday to find the correct plan structure and plan lines to check your transaction against, your transaction worktags must:
  • Include all the required structured dimension members on a plan structure.
  • Exactly match the worktags on a plan line on the plan structure.
If you configure commitment accounting at a later date:
  • For spend and procurement transactions, you must close all open purchase orders first.
  • For payroll transactions, you must create initial payroll commitments. Exclude completed payroll periods so that Workday only creates commitments for ongoing or future payroll periods. If you don't exclude completed payroll periods, Workday creates commitments for the entire year. Workday begins to liquidate the commitments after the first payroll of the year.

Limitations

You can only configure up to 50 budgetary control option lines.
Workday doesn't use these structured dimensions to match a transaction to a plan structure and plan lines for staffing budget check:
  • Job Family
  • Job Family Group
  • Job Profile

Tenant

No impact.

Security

Users with access to the
Set Up: Budget General
 domain in the Budgets functional area can configure budgetary control for plans and budgets.
When you use budget check overrides, configure the Budget Check Exception Override Approver security group.

Business Processes

You can add these business processes as a subprocess to your Financial and Staffing business processes:
  • Check Budget (Financial)
  • Check Budget (Staffing)
You can configure the
Check Budget (Staffing)
 subprocess to check your staffing transactions for both Job Management and Position Management positions against your financial plan.
We recommend that you configure the
Check Budget (Financial)
 business process with a
batch/job
 type
Run Budget Check
 step for better performance. Create a role specifically to run this
batch/job
 step with:
  • A profile that doesn't run on a browser.
  • A nonexpiring password.

Reporting

Report Data Source
Consideration
Plan Lines for Financial Reporting
Use to create reports on the plan lines for your plans and budgets.
Journal Lines for Financial Reporting
Use to create custom reports on commitments, obligations, and actuals when you use commitment accounting.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

When you use commitment accounting, Workday posts journal entries to your ledgers after these transaction types pass budget check:
  • Expense
  • Payroll
  • Procurement
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships across your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.