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Budgets

Financial admins with the proper permissions can create and manage multiple budgets. This article explains how to create new budgets, edit budgets, change budget status, and (for Illinois districts) export budgets.

Creating budgets
Editing budgets
Budget status
Exporting budgets

Creating budgets

Create a single budget or multiple budgets to assess different revenue and expense scenarios.

To create a new budget:

  1. Go to Financials Main > Budgeting > Budgets > Create
  2. Enter a Description
  3. Choose one of the Create Using options to prepopulate Revenues and Expenditures using data from previous years
    • Previous Budget: Copy a budget created in the previous fiscal year
    • Actual for Year: Fill in the budget with actual revenues and expenditures from a specified fiscal year.
    • Actual YTD + PY Actual DTE: Estimate a year’s revenues and expenditures by adding the numbers from the first part of one year to the numbers from the second part of the previous year. For example, if you are building the 2020-21 budget on August 31, 2020, you may want to use the current fiscal year’s data from July and August of 2020, then estimate the last ten months based on the previous fiscal year. Choose the date 8/31/2020 and the fiscal year 2020-21. The system adds the revenues and expenditures from 7/1/2020-8/31/2020 and 9/1/2019-6/30/2020, then fill that sum into the new budget.
    • None: The budget will be blank. No data will be prepopulated.
  4. Save

Editing budgets

After creation, review and edit the budgeted amounts for each account.

To edit a budget:

  1. Go to Financials Main > Budgeting > Budgets
  2. Data Entry
  3. Choose a Type of data to enter (Revenues, Expenditures, etc.)
  4. Enter values into the Amount column
  5. Save Changes

Only accounts that have been entered in the Chart of Accounts will appear on the data entry page. If an account is missing, go to Financials > Setup > Chart of Accounts to add it (read more).

Budget status

When you create a budget, its default status is Draft, indicating that it is a work in progress and has yet to be completed/adopted. There are four budget statuses:

  • Draft
  • Unofficially adopted
  • Officially adopted
  • Superseded

A budget in either unofficially adopted or officially adopted status is for all intents and purposes, the budget in effect; therefore, only one budget may be in adopted status at any given time. As such, if you set a second budget to adopted status, the previously adopted budget will be set to superseded status to indicate that it is no longer in effect.

To change the status of a budget:

  1. Go to Financials Main > Budgeting > Budgets
  2. Edit
  3. Select a Status
  4. Choose an effective Date, unless the status is Draft
  5. Save

Exporting budgets

Once the budget is officially adopted, Illinois school districts can export the data into ISBE’s budget spreadsheet.

To export the budget:

  1. Go to Financials Main > Budgeting > Budgets
  2. Click the down arrow and Export ISBE Budget Spreadsheet
  3. The file should automatically download to your hard drive