Now that this project is approved and the plan data validated, you can enter a budget in order to use the budget availability control feature. You want to know how the mechanism works and what to pay attention to.
Budgeting is short-term financial planning that involves determining future revenues and expenses. Since overhead cost projects and cost centers don’t generate revenues, their budgets are restricted to the expenditure side. A budget specifies which funds are available.
An original budget is uploaded to the overhead project and can then be changed by supplements and returns. The annual or overall budget can be used for availability control: The project’s budget availability control profile determines the tolerance limits. If exceeded, the limits will trigger a warning or will prevent creating commitments or posting actual costs.
When you upload the budget for a project, you must specify the G/L account(s) to post to. Generally, you only need to budget on the complete project level, so the G/L accounting definition is more a technical requirement and is not critical.
Note
You can control a budget for a specific group of costs (such as travel costs, or marketing materials). For this, you can define each group of costs as a semantic tag. Semantic tags are assigned to G/L accounts. So, you can manage budgets also per semantic tags by budgeting on G/L accounts that correspond to different semantic tags. This scenario will not be covered in this course.
The video explains availability control through an example: