Budgeting

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Oracle General Ledger provides a variety of powerful and flexible budgeting tools for better planning and control without the drudgery you often associate with budgeting. With Oracle General Ledger, you can spend your valuable time analyzing budgets, not entering data.
Business Needs
With Oracle General Ledger you can:
•        Create top down, bottom up, middle out, zero-based, and flex budgets
•        Enter budget journal entries to provide an audit trail for budget amounts entered
•        Use popular spreadsheets to do your budgeting and upload the data into Oracle General Ledger
•        Create as many different versions of budgets as you wish and compare various versions to view the differences
•        Create a new budget quickly by basing it on an existing budget or prior actuals
•        Control access to budgets
•        Calculate budgets the same way you calculate actuals. For example, if you allocate total benefit costs to cost centers based on headcount, you can budget headcount and total benefit costs and let Oracle General Ledger create detailed cost center budgets for you
•        Create budget allocation entries using a simple allocation formula
•        Create master-detail budgets. For example, you can define a master budget at the division-level and link to it all related department-level budgets. At any point in the budgeting process, you can review on-line or through reports the budgets that exceed control limits
•        Translate budget balances as well as actuals to create budget versus actual reports in your reporting currency
Major Features
Unlimited Budget Versions
You can have as many budget versions as you want. For example, you may want to maintain different budgets for internal, external and compensation reporting. Or, you may want to revise your budgets as a result of changing economic conditions or business goals. Simply copy an existing budget and make your changes. Use any budget version in any report and even compare different versions of your budgets.
Budget Organizations
You can use budget organizations to decentralize budgeting.  Define budget organizations along department, division, or cost center lines to decentralize budgeting within an organization.  Or, centralize budgeting by having only one budget organization.  In either case, you have the power and flexibility to determine who enters budget data by assigning passwords to budget organizations within your enterprise.  Distribute budget entry where you feel it belongs.

Oracle General Ledger lets you define budget organizations easily
Budget Amount Entry
You can automatically replace existing budget balances by entering new budget amounts for your accounts. You can enter budgets according to your planning needs: weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.  In addition, you can use a variety of shorthand techniques to speed data entry.
Budget Journal Entry
You can create budget journal entries to provide an audit trail for your budget. Review, update or delete your budget journals. Then post the budget journal entries to increment budget balances.
Integrated Spreadsheet Budgeting
Oracle General Ledger’s GL Desktop Integrator (GLDI) Budget Wizard provides a spreadsheet-based budget entry screen which facilitates simple data entry and modeling in a disconnected environment.  Use the Budget Wizard to automatically build a budget spreadsheet based on the budgets and budget organizations you set up within Oracle General Ledger.  You can download existing budget balances from Oracle General Ledger or create a new budget.  Enter your new budget balances manually, use budget rules, or use formulas and models.  You can then automatically graph your budgets, and even compare budget and actual balances using a variety of graph styles.  Afterward, you can save a budget spreadsheet on your PC and work on it at any time.  When you are satisfied with your budget, you can automatically upload your new budget balances into Oracle General Ledger.
Budget Formulas
Budget formulas let you build a complete budget with any combination of fixed amounts and account balances, including actual or budget amounts, statistics, and period-to-date or year-to-date balances. For example, you can draft an entire budget using the previous year's actual data, statistical data or another budget. You can copy an existing formula, instead of starting from scratch. Your formulas can be simple or complex. You can even use budget formulas to create flexible budgets and perform budget allocations.
MassBudgeting
MassBudgeting allows you to perform budget allocations across departments, divisions and so on, using one simple formula. By including parent values in your formula, you can allocate to child values without having to enumerate each one separately. Create budget allocation batches based on actual, encumbrance, budget or statistical balances. Run your MassBudget batch multiple times without reversing previously allocated journal batches by running MassBudgeting in incremental mode.
Spreadsheet Interface
You may prefer to budget on your personal computer using a spreadsheet such as Lotus 1-2-3. The Oracle General Ledger spreadsheet interface lets you transfer actual and budget data from your spreadsheet into Oracle General Ledger.

Budget upload methods
Budget Translation
You can translate budget balances as well as actuals. This allows you to create budget versus actuals reports in your reporting currency using the Financial Statement Generator.