Site Budget Enhancements

The following 07 min 31 sec clip walks you through the various enhancements to Site Budgeting that gives administrators and schedulers greater control over the site budget using the Manage Budgets functionality and Pay Alerts. It shows how Site Budgeting is configured from the Budget Summary screen (Admin | Finance | Site Budgets). and how Site Pay Alerts are managed through the Site card (under Set Up | Site | General, Pay Alert). Security functions are also covered during the clip, explaining how to ensure only the correct people have access to the new site budget enhancements.

These features are particularly useful for System Administrators to restrict unauthorised duties being authorised from outside of the approved site budget. It will also allow Contract Managers or Site Administrators to see how site budgets are being used and if service levels are being met.

New site budget enhancements have been introduced to help schedulers prevent a site from going over budget for a selected period of time (from between 1 to 4 weeks). The new feature is implemented at an individual site level, and not a Timegate Web-wide level. In terms of operation, when booking duties, schedulers are advised as of to whether the site they are managing is “On Budget” or “Over Budget”. These messages will be shown in the Site View and the Site Teams screens in bold text. “On Budget” will be orange text. “Over Budget” will be red text. Every time a duty is edited, added or deleted a background process calculates budget compliance - displaying one of the two messages as appropriate. The system does this using the latest phase pay and the hours. The check is based only on the week that is being looked at. If the transaction results in the site going over budget, schedulers will not be allowed to add further duties. If the site goes over-budget midway through a duty, the system prevents any additional duties being added. The actuals are calculated using the latest phase pay and the hours. If it were the start of the year and the budget is being monitored over a two week period, if the budget is exceeded in week one, it will show as over budget in both week one and week two. When week three is navigated to, the bold red warnings will disappear. The red messages are not displayed because they are only shown on the site for the duration of being over budget. If under budget no messages are shown on the screen.

To configure this functionality for a given Site from within the Admin | Finance | Site Budget screen, select the site of choice. A Manage Budget radio button has been added to the screen. Once the Manage Budget option is selected, the user is then presented with an option to choose the duration over which they wish to track budgeting. They should select from 1 week to 4 weeks.

It should be noted that Hour Types that are set as Exclude from Budget (under the Invoicing and contracts section of the settings page) when configured in Admin | Finance | Hour Types are able to create the duty regardless of permissions, even if the site is “On Budget” or “Over Budget”.

In conjunction with the site budget enhancements, a new report has been developed that is sent to members of the Escalation group that is defined in the Branch Maintenance page, under the Pay Alert Escalation section. The report lists all sites that are currently over budget only, in terms of hours or pay. The report is, as standard run configured to run once a day.

Of final note and importance, by default the system prevents any additional duties being added by users when the site is “On Budget” or “Over Budget”. If you would like to override this setting for a given subset of users, giving them the permission to create duties when the site is on or over budget, this can be done enabling the security feature “Allow Duty Budget Override” for the user(s).