Appearance
Accept the budget
Use this when every team's budget in a run has been approved and the request shows In Review. Accepting makes it the fiscal year's budget.
You need access to accept budget requests — ask your Flowstate admin. If your organisation has named Financial Approvers, only they can accept.
Before you accept
Make sure every move between team budgets has been accepted or declined. Any still waiting are closed without a decision when you accept.
Then go to Finance → Budgets → Review, open the request, and check it using the tabs at the bottom of the page.
Changes made
Every change in the run in one list: changes made in the base plan, and changes in every team budget that hasn't been sent back.
- Changes from a team budget that isn't approved yet are marked Proposed. Changes from approved team budgets are marked Approved.
- To find a change, use Search changes…, or narrow the list with the filters: Group (such as New hires or Team moves), Type (such as Employee or Vacancy), Change (Added, Removed or Modified) and Status (Proposed, Approved or Base plan).
- To comment on a change, select Discuss.
To undo a change made in the base plan:
- Select Revert change on its row.
- Select Revert.
An added person or vacancy is removed, a changed one goes back to its live values, and a removed one comes back. Changes inside a team's budget can't be reverted from here — only from that team's budget, while it can still be changed.
Forecast
The run's forecast for its whole fiscal year, by team, with the cost of the run's changes highlighted.
- Choose Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly.
- Under Proposals, choose which team budgets to include:
- Approved only, the default — the base plan and every approved team budget. This is what you're accepting.
- Include pending — also team budgets still being filled in or waiting for approval. A tag shows how many are included. Budgets that were sent back are never included.
Initiatives
The fiscal year's initiatives, grouped by objective. Initiatives without an objective are under No objective at the end, and each objective's row adds up its initiatives.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Committed FTE | The FTE committed to the initiative |
| Forecast cost | The initiative's forecast cost for the run's fiscal year |
| Budget | The initiative's own budget, or a dash if it has none |
Select an initiative's name to open it on the roadmap. Cost columns need access to financial figures.
Accept it
- To keep a copy for sign-off, select Export.
- Select Accept.
- Select Confirm. You can't undo this.
What accepting does and doesn't do
| Accepting does | Accepting doesn't |
|---|---|
| Save a new budget version for the fiscal year on Finance → Budgets → Budgets | Change any employee, contractor, vacancy, allocation or salary in your live records |
| Give each team its own budget — its cost and FTE for the year | Create hires or vacancies |
| Show each team as over or under its budget on the Teams list | Change the forecast |
| Mark the request Accepted and tell the people involved | Change capitalisation or R&D figures, which come from effort |
Accepting is how you lock the budget. Until then, changes to your live records keep flowing into every team's budget. Afterwards the budget stays as it was, the forecast carries on following your live records, and the difference shows as drift.
To make the budget real, add the agreed hires and changes in live data, or build them in a scenario and merge it.
An accepted budget can't be reopened. To change one team's budget later, change it mid-year. To replace the whole budget, start a new run or snapshot the forecast.
If something's not right
Accept is greyed out. Some teams' budgets aren't approved yet. Check Team budgets on the request's Overview.
"Only financial approvers can lock the budget." Your organisation has named Financial Approvers, and you aren't one of them.
"Cannot lock: the base plan changed after approval …" Someone changed the base plan after a top-level team's budget was approved, and the two now disagree. Undo that team's approval, resolve the merge conflicts, approve it again, then accept.
There's no Revert change on a row. The change is inside a team's budget, not the base plan.
You want to end the run without a budget. Select Close request from the request's menu.