We are looking at starting to make use of the GL Account Budgets that can be set up within Financial Management. They seem very straightforward to set up, but I want to understand the full implications this may have in other areas of the system (if any)?
Is anyone else already using GL Account Budgets? Does this tie into any other areas of the system? Are there standard reports that can be used to compare Budgets vs Actuals, or will custom dashboards be needed?
Any information would be helpful, as I have found it quite difficult to find much documentation on this anywhere else!
As far as the reporting question, there are standard functions within the primary Epicor Financial reporting packages that make use of the values in the GL Account Budgets (Financial Report Designer, XL Connect, etc. can all use this data for Budget vs. actual calculations). As far as out of the box reporting on budgets, it’s fairly slim. I think that you can use the GL Account budgets for Cash Flow Analysis, but other than that, it will primarily be custom reporting.
Budgets are pretty easy to setup and use. The biggest thing that I’ve seen confuse people is remembering the debits and credits (if you budget revenue, for instance, it needs to be entered as a negative amount since it’s a credit, etc.) It can also be pretty tedious on the data entry side, so I would highly recommend DMT or an updateable dashboard for creating and keeping updated.