Commercial Projects and Budgets
Overview
Commercial Budgets are a mechanism to restrict contracts and invoices. This system allows the Managing Agents (also called MA) to setup a limit for spending and ensure that Contracts do not exceed this limit.
When Dashboards privilege (for Managing Agent and buildings) is enabled, it shows a panel on top of the home page for Managing Agents, Managing Agents on Site and Local Property Managers-
POs awaiting your approval: 'Contracts' are also known as 'Purchase orders' alternatively by some of our clients. It shows the POs requiring user's approval - Please note, the user has to be the next in line to approve the PO on the PO's approvals tab. If the user isn't next in line to approve the PO, the counter won't include the PO in the count.
Invoices for you to approve: This shows the count of invoices requiring the user's approval regardless of the building the invoice is linked to. Invoices disputed to the user are not counted. If a user has a saved search filter set up, the count returns the number of invoices the saved search matches.
All invoices awaiting approval: All invoices awaiting approval on a building, please note if a user has a role that has a recoverability set, the count will not return the count of invoices linked to other recoverabilities. Invoices in dispute state and invoices in accounts payable to approve state are also returned.
Conceptually there are Projects and Budget Items. A project is a group of Budget Items:
As you can see each Budget item maps an Expense Type and Transaction code.
- Budgeted: The maximum that can be spent for this building/Expense Type/Transaction Code
- Previously Spent: This allows a value to be set that was spent before the budget was created in Dwellant. So Last year 1 million may have been budgeted, then £250,000. This will be imported as a Budgeted of 1 million, Previously spent £250,000, allowing £750,000 worth of contracts to be created.
- Allocated: Value of Contracts against the building/Expense Type/Transaction Code
- Invoiced: Total value of invoices received (note when the Budget privilege is enabled invoices may not exceed the contract in value)
- Unallocated: Remaining spend
Contract editor -
- When the privilege is enabled contracts can be assigned to a project. When this happens expense type and transaction codes are limited to the Budget Items.
- A project can be created with a specific recoverability and this effects the filtering more or less as expected.
Building / Setup / Accounting / Budgets
Projects can be added and budgets set.
Budget items are set per Expense Type and Transaction Code. These are always for the Capex recoverability type.
Field |
Description |
|---|---|
| Budgeted | The budget amount for the item. |
| Previously spent | An amount that can be manually entered that has already been spent that will not be invoiced through Dwellant. (Likely to be entered during initial setup.) |
| Allocated | The value that has been set on contracts for this budget and expense type / transaction code. |
| Invoiced | The value of fully approved invoices for the contracts. |
| Unallocated | The amount remaining that can be allocated against contracts. Budgeted - Previously spent - Allocated |
Contracts
Now an additional checkbox is added that allows the value of the contract to be hidden from the contractor. A project can be selected. This dictates what expense types are available to be selected for the contract.
If the value of the cost assignment is greater than the unallocated amount on the project budget then the contract will not be allowed to be saved.
When a contract value or project or cost assignments change the allocated amounts on the project are updated.
Invoices
When an invoice is approved by Accounts Payable the Invoiced amounts on the project for the contract are updated.
On portal
Upload
A spreadsheet Upload/Download exists at managing agent level. This allows both budget items and projects to be created. If `ProjectId` is missing then a new project is created. It matches this by name so it wont create a set of duplicate projects.