Overview
Oracle HR Budgeting enables you to reallocate control budget resources from one line item to another, as you identify excess and deficit amounts. You can also reserve amounts by line item, so you cannot use them. You do this using a web-based interface, available from the Navigator by selecting Budget Reallocation. The following sections describe the steps in the process:
Find a Control Budget
Create a Reallocation Folder
Create a Transaction
Identify Donors/Periods/Receivers
Route the Folder for Approval
The remaining sections provide information about related activities, including viewing or acting upon pending and approved transactions, configurable business rules, migrating pre-existing reallocations, and troubleshooting in the Process Log.
On the Find Budget page, you search for control budgets that are in effect on a date you specify. You can further restrict the search by specifying an entity (Position, Job, Grade, Organization) or budget measurement unit (Money, FTE, Headcount, Hours, or user-defined Share Type).
Only one control budget can be in effect on a given date for each entity/unit combination, and each budget can allocate up to three units. The application displays the search results in rows, each row displaying information about a budget, entity, and unit.
After selecting a search result row, you can create a new folder to hold transactions relating to the selected budget and entity/unit combination. A folder is a virtual container for your transactions. When you approve a folder, you approve all transactions within it (partial approval is not possible).
The Add Transactions, Donors, and Receivers page displays your folder, where you can create a new transaction. The page displays information about Donor and Receiver entities, Unit, Reserved Amount, Transaction Amount, and Transaction Balance.
Unit: the budget measurement unit, such as Money or FTE.
Reserved Amount: the portion of this line item's allocation that you cannot use, even for the line item itself.
Transaction Amount: the total number of units you are transferring.
Transaction Balance: the difference between the Donor and Receiver amounts. If a positive number, you have not yet assigned all donated units to Receivers. If a negative number, you have assigned more units to Receivers than you have donated. The transaction balance must be zero before routing or approving the folder.
Next you select line items with excess resources to donate. In addition to displaying amounts available for donation, the page displays information about the organization, location, and job, as well as budgeted, actual, committed, donated, and received amounts.
You can also view unapproved pending donation amounts. The application does not subtract Unapproved Donation amounts from Available amounts. Nevertheless, future-approved transactions can reduce available amounts before you approve your folder, causing your transaction to fail.
On the Donor Periods page, you can donate amounts at the budget period level. Here you can specify both Reserved and Donated amounts.
Note: Within one transaction, a single donor can transfer to one or more receivers, and multiple donors can transfer to one receiver. Many donors cannot transfer to many receivers.
On the Add Receivers page, you can select entities from a list to receive your donation. Here you also specify the Start and End Dates of the transfer (both of which must fall within the date range of the budget's Fiscal Period), and the amount of the transfer. Receiver entities do not have to be in the selected budget, though they must have the same entity as that of the Donor.
The Routing Options page appears when you submit your transaction for approval. There you can save the folder to your Inbox, reject it, forward it to a qualified recipient, or (if you are a designated approver) apply the folder to the database. You configure default routing options and approvers for budget reallocation in Standard Setup, and routing and approval rules for automated workflow in Advanced Setup.
For information about Standard and Advanced Setup in the Transaction Type Wizard, see Transaction Type Wizard.
Each Search Results row on the Find Budget page gives you the option to view all unapproved transactions relating to the entity/unit combination. Here you can search for reallocation folders by name, or display them all. The application displays information about the transaction amounts and current owners of each folder. You can select one or more folders, and perform the following actions on them:
Notify Budget Manager: sends an FYI Notification to all budget managers in your business group. Using the Notify Self option below, any budget manager can take ownership of the folder and work on it.
Notify Self: sends the selected folders to yourself. This action always takes ownership of the folder.
Delete: removes the selected folders from the system, canceling the transactions.
Notification recipients can link to the folder and work on it.
Note: Though budget reallocation notifications do appear in the Workflow Notifications Inbox, they do not contain links to the folder. To link to the folder, workflow recipients must navigate to the Advanced Worklist, using a Workflow User Web Interface responsibility via Self Service.
In each Search Results row of the Find Budget page, choosing a View Approved Reallocations icon takes you to a page where you can view all approved transactions relating to the entity/unit combination. Here you can view transaction amounts and balances.
Note: One caveat when you work with the Oracle web-based interface: the Select All option selects only those rows on the current page. If your list is too large to display on a single page, Select All will not affect rows on other pages.
You can define process rules to ensure that budget reallocations adhere to the business practices of your organization. The application invokes process rules and validates reallocation transactions when you apply folders to the database.
For information about configurable business rules, see Business Rules.
For information about available reallocation transaction attributes and their related categories, contexts, and warning messages, see Process Rules Reference.
The application migrates any pre-existing budget reallocations automatically, when you install a patch containing the budget reallocation function for the first time. You can review the migrated folders on the View Pending Reallocations page, and notify budget managers, notify yourself, or delete, as described above. Migrated transactions have no owner, but anyone can use the Notify Self option to take ownership.
Caution: The application deletes any pre-existing non-control budget reallocations on installation. If you have reallocated or reserved budget amounts for non-control budgets, make notes of these transfers before installation.
Budget Reallocation is available as a View option in the Process Log. Here you can troubleshoot failures to apply reallocation transactions by reviewing error messages and details relating to folders, transactions, donors, and receivers.
For information about troubleshooting in the Process Log, see Using the Process Log.