The budgeting module has been improved upon over previous releases of the application. It mainly focuses on the business budgeting process, starting with the budget planning process, which requires organizational efforts from the operations and finance departments. The planning stages consist of all the required steps and workflow approvals, and cover different scenarios of planning approaches to give the needed flexibility in the module's implementation. Then, the approved budget plan is converted to a registered budget that will be the control point during the execution of transactions. The final stage is the reporting, which monitors the operation's performance by comparing actual versus budget. The budgeting process will vary from company to company, based on organization size and its own internal control procedures. There are different types of budgeting methodologies, including zero-based budgeting, historical budgeting, as well as top-down budget planning and bottom-up budget planning.
The elements of the budgeting module in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations consist of four features:
As shown in the proceeding diagram, the elements of the budgeting management module consist of:
- Basic budgeting: This feature represents the basic setup and configurations of the budget module, budget models, budget codes, dimensions for budgeting, and budget allocation terms.
- Budget planning: This feature represents the setup and configurations of the budget planning process, scenarios, stages, budget planning security options, and budget planning workflow and its stages, in addition to Excel/Word templates.
- Budget register entries: This feature represents the approved budgeted amounts for each main account and dimension; it will be used in reporting as well.
- Budget control: This feature represents the setup and configurations of budget control on which source documents, and exceptions to exceed the budgets.