Budgeting

Track the amount of money committed to, paid out, and remaining for each program. Track the overall community giving budget for your business and assign payments to particular GL Codes to align with your accounting team.

NOTE: The Follow Up Forms feature is only available for those with a 'Plus Advanced' or 'Premium Advanced' subscription. If you would like to upgrade your account, email us at info@dosomegood.ca. 

Check out this 30-second video that gives you a quick overview of Do Some Good's powerful and easy-to-use budgeting tools:

• Creating a Budget
• Editing a Budget
• Parent Budgets and Contributing Budgets
• Viewing a Budget Summary
• Viewing Your Budget List
• Different Types of Budget Assignment
  • Budget Splitting
  • Assigning by Entire Amount
  • Assign by In-Kind / Cash Monetary
  • Assign by Field / Element
• Best Practices
  • Regional Budgets
  • Program Budgets
  • Category Budgets

Creating a Budget 

To create a budget, go to the Forms & Story Generator page your Management Area and click on the the Budget tab. Then click the 'Add Budget' button.
 

When adding a new budget you will be able to define the following properties. Each of these properties are editable after the budget is created: 

• Parent Budget: If your budget is part of a larger overall budget, pick the top level budget you want the new budget to be part of. All amounts in your new budget will roll up to the parent budget as you assign values and submissions. It is not mandatory that your new budget has a parent budget.
• Budget Name: The descriptive name for your budget that will be meaningful to your team.
• GL Code (Optional): If your new budget aligns with a GL code used by your business you can assign it here. You can use the values in each submission to help your accounts payable person reconcile the payment.
• Description / Notes to Team (Optional): Free form notes for you team. Useful information might be to describe which types of giving should be assigned to this budget. Perhaps it is for a particular region, branch, or franchise. Perhaps it is for a specific type of giving like event funding or in-kind donations. Whatever would be helpful to your team can be added here and will also show up in the budget selection workflow.
• Total Budget Amount (Optional): This is the total amount you have to give for this category. This value is not enforced and you are allowed to assign this budget to submissions even if it will exceed the budget. If you do not assign a total budget amount, the amounts of committed and paid funds that are assigned to the budget will still be listed, but there will not be a total amount or an amount remaining.
• Budget Deadline (Optional): The date on which this budget will be closed. All payouts and submission assignments must be complete by this time.
• Applicable Submission Date Range (Optional): If the budget is only applicable to submissions that came in after a certain date (start date only), before a certain date (end date only) or between two dates (both values set) you can use this date range to provide limits. Only submissions with a submission date (not state change or payout date) that complies with the date range will be allowed to assign the new budget. 
   

Editing a budget

You can edit your budgets in two different ways. You can click on the triple dot menu next to your budget and select 'Edit Budget'.

You can also edit a budget by clicking on the 'Details' button next to a budget and then selecting 'Edit Budget Details'. 

Note: When editing a budget, be aware that we will not remove any submissions that are already assigned. For instance, if you change the Applicable Submission Date Range so some submissions are excluded, existing transactions will remain connected to the budget, but new submissions will not be able to be assigned to the budget if they are outside of the date range. 

Parent Budgets and Contributing Budgets

Any budget you create can be used as a parent budget of another budget. The parent/contributing budget relationship is shown in the image below - two budgets ('Cash Donations' and 'In-kind Donations') contributing to one parent budget ('Western Region Local Giving'). Contributing budgets are indented beneath the parent budget and a contributing budget can only contribute to one parent. 

How a Parent Budget is Created

When you click to create a budget, you are taken to the 'Add Budget' page. To create a parent budget, be sure to select 'No Parent, Top Level Budget' from the drop-down list. 

How a Contributing Budget is Created

A contributing budget is created by selecting a parent budget from the 'Parent Budget' drop-down list on the 'Add Budget' page. This means that when you assign your contributing budget to a submission, any requested, committed, or paid funds will appear in the contributing budget and will also contribute to the parent budget total.

An example of when you might want to use a parent budget is if you have different categories of giving that contribute to an overall budget. Those categories could be program types, regional budgets, giving types (cash vs services or in-kind giving) or any other category that makes sense for your team. You then allocate submission amounts to the budgets and your Budgets tab will track all activity. 
 

Assigning Submission Values to a Parent Budget

By default, when a budget becomes a parent budget, you cannot directly allocate funds to that budget. However, you can change this if you like. If you want to be able to allocate funds directly to a parent budget (rather than allocating to a contributing budget), simply check the "Allow assigning submission monetary values..." box at the bottom of your 'Edit Budget' page. (Not sure how to find that page? Click here.)

You can even have multiple levels for your contributing budgets. For example, you may have a parent budget that has several regional budgets contribute to it. Then each of your regional budgets can have budgets for individual programs or giving types. Create as many budgets as you need, with as many levels as you need, to achieve your goals. 

Viewing Your Budget List

To see your list of budgets, go to the Forms & Story Generator page your Management Area and click on the the Budget tab. You may also see an 'Unassigned' budget where all submissions that are not specifically assigned to a budget are recorded. 

The columns shown for each budget are: 

• Total Amount: If your budget has a 'Total Amount' optionally assigned in its settings, that value will be displayed. It represents the maximum amount of funds available for that budget but it is not enforced by Do Some Good. It is possible to over allocate submissions to a budget.
• Pending: The total amount of funds, for all submissions assigned to the budget, that are still in a pending state like ‘Unprocessed' or ‘In Review’.
• Committed:The amount of funds, for all submissions assigned to that budget, that have been moved to an ‘Approved’ state but not yet paid out.
• Paid: The amount of funds, for all submissions assigned to that budget, that have been moved to a 'Paid' state.
• Unused Amount: The ‘Total Amount’ minus the ‘Pending’ and ‘Committed’ amounts. This is only available if a Total Amount is set for this budget.

How to Assign a Budget, or Multiple Budgets, to Submission(s)

There are multiple ways ways a budget can be assigned to a single submission or multiple submissions.

Submission Details Page

If you are looking at the Submission Details page you will see a Financial Overview that summarizes all of the requested amounts and any changes made by your team. Below this overview, you will see an option to "Assign Budget(s)" which will take you to the budget assignment dialog. If you already have budget(s) assigned, the Financial Overview will include budgeting information and the button will read "Edit Budget Assignments". 

Triple Dot Menu

While on your 'Submissions' tab, next to each submission in your view, there is a triple dot menu. In this menu is an option to assign a budget(s). 

 

Bulk Assignment

If you select multiple submissions using the checkboxes on the left, a bulk option opens up at the top to assign a budget(s) to all selected submissions. The same allocation percent chosen when you set up the budget will be assigned to every selected submission. 

During the State Change Workflow

If you are changing the state on a submission, you have the option to do other things like notify the applicant, send them a custom message and change the ownership of the submission.  Now that the budgeting feature has implemented, assigning a budget is another thing that can be done during state change. To keep the amount of information in the state change manageable, we are: 

• Limiting the ability to assign budgets to single submission state change. This feature is not available for bulk submission state change.
• The state change window has been split into two steps. The first is the state selection and applicant notification. The second step is to assign ownerships and budgets.  

Step 1

Step 2

Different Types of Budget Assignment

Our system is flexible enough to track all of your giving behaviour. The Budgeting feature can be very simple with you assigning an entire submission, or group of submissions to a single budget. Or you could assign a group of budgets with different percentage allocations to each requested amount in a submission. The following sections describe the different methods of assigning budgets to submissions. 

Budget Splitting

For every type of budget assignment (see below), you can assign a single budget to a particular value, or you can assign multiple budgets to a value. If you assign multiple budgets to a submission, request type or element you can adjust the ratio of the split between the budget. You can make this adjustment with the visual slider bars, or you can type in a cash amount for each budget (see image below). As you make changes, the other budget ratios and values adjust automatically. 

If you have multiple budgets allocated, and you subsequently modify one of the request amounts allocated to that budget, the software will attempt to adjust the amounts automatically and maintain the ratio whenever possible. 

Assigning by Entire Amount

The first tab in the Assign Budgets window is the most straightforward. All request amounts are added up into a total sum. That sum is listed in the window as "Total Amount". 

Assign by In-Kind / Cash Monetary

The second tab in the 'Assign Budgets' window refers to the type of value - in-kind or cash/monetary. This method of assignment groups all cash tally amounts into one total, regardless of the number of individual cash request elements in your submission. The same goes for the total amount of in-kind funding requested. 

One or more budgets can be applied to each of the two categories, and if multiple budgets are selected in an individual category, the ratios of allocation can be adjusted.  

Assign by Field / Element

The third tab, or method of budget assignment, lists every donation request amount element (Tally Field) from your submission individually. Each individual form element can be allocated to one or more budgets independently. There is no grouping of elements into cash or in-kind totals. 

Best Practices

Here are some different scenarios where you could use Do Some Good's budget tools to make your life easier. This is not an exhaustive list - the possibilities are endless!

Regional Budgets

If you have teams in different regions that each have a funds they can distribute autonomously, you may want to define a budget for each region so you can track their progress toward their funding goals. This is helpful for the overall organization as well as each individual region. 

Program Budgets

Do you have different programs like a community investment, a scholarship and an event sponsorship program? You can track the requested, committed and paid funds for each form using a custom budget. You would assign each submission to the correct budget to keep your giving programs on track toward their monetary goals. 

Category Budgets

Do you track cash donations different from in-kind donations? Do you track different GL Codes based on the types of giving you perform? If that is the case, create budgets for your various categories of giving and assign appropriate businesses to the budgets that align with your giving goals. Or create a budget for each GL Code if that's easier.