An existing Adagio client with several modules is asking bout the PO module (which they do not run yet).
I understand that the PO module does offer Event Budgets, but I am not certain if it allows the following:

1. If we enter budget amounts to GL accounts, can we get the PO module to halt or reject an entry if the amount will cause the GL account to go over their specific budget limit?

2. Upon entering a PO can we report on costs-to-be to GL accounts before the PO is received or invoiced?

Hi Samuel

I don't know much about Event Budgets (I don't think anyone does), but I can almost guarantee you that they are not the solution you are looking for.

However, there is a solution, and it has to do with JobCost. PO can flag an entry that would cause the amount to exceed the Job Estimate in JobCost.

So to get where you want to be (assuming you are not using JobCost for any other purpose), you would create one new job each fiscal year, and give it Phases/Categories that correspond to the GL Accounts/Departments, with the budget amount entered as the estimate. You would then code the PO detail lines to the correct Job (fiscal year), Phase (account), and Category (department).

I hope this makes sense. It's a bit of a workaround, but it does work.

Steve

Hi Sam,

The answer to your first question is no. Event budgets have to be setup separately in Purchase Orders and are not dynamically linked to the GL. But you can retrieve GL budgets into Purchase Orders and then PO can be set to block purchases if it's over the "event" budget which tracks the GL totals. The problem is that if you make changes to the budgets in the GL, event budgets won't know about the change in budget unless you retrieve them in PO.

As for your second question, it sounds like you're trying to do encumbrance accounting. There is a workaround for it, but it's not easy to setup and requires PO, Gridview, provisional posting and FX.

Steve & Dan:

I appreciate your expertise and weighing in on this topic to let me know what may be involved here.
Thank you!

Hi Samuel,

If the client has not yet purchased Adagio Purchase orders, you could look at POTracker.

POTracker can make direct use of the Ledger budgets to prevent or warn if the budget in ledger would be exceeded by a new PO including current outstanding purchase orders.

The user can be assigned departments that they can use when creating purchase orders and they can only view PO's that have been created for those departments.

Give me a call if you would like to see an online overview or download a demo version of the program.

Revisiting this topic.
There is a Show-Me video on Event Budgets for PO. Based on the video, I was able to copy the GL budget amounts for various GL Account-Dept’s over to the PO.
In the Company Profile, I set the system to not permit posting when we go over budget.
I have managed to do this in PO and it appears to work.

And you are correct, Dan.
If we adjust the budget amounts in the GL, then yes, we have to re-import the GL budget values into PO. Otherwise, the incorrect pre-adjusted values remain unchanged in the PO module.

Here is one question that I am unsure about: What happens when the new fiscal year starts up?
Is it possible to get the PO Events to adjust to the new year, and start counting all over again?

Hi Sam,

If you create the Next Fiscal Year in GL, nothing changes in PO Event budgets. They have no ability to differentiate fiscal years. The GL retrieve only looks at the current fiscal year. So you would have to finish off your current year and run the maintenance>close in GL before you can retrieve the budgets from the new year (which would then be the current year). And since the "Amount spent" is retrieved from GL in that process, it would reset to the balance of the GL account retrieved. The Amount committed, still reads your open PO's.
So the issue is that you won't be checking against the next year budgets if you create PO's with a next fiscal year date while the current year is still open in GL.

Hi Sam,
As Dan has stated, there are issues with Event Tracking in PO's. We created the PO product as Purchase Orders for Adagio and could not get the Event Tracker to work properly with GL budgets.

The issue was specific to crossing over fiscal years. To be clear, we did the product design and we will not use PO Event Tracking for any of our clients.

We have a solution that we have installed for encumbrance accounting, that can do either soft or hard encumbrance accounting, that considers the PO module integrated with FX and Gridview and is quite a solution.

Best,
Brian

Hi Samuel

As I mentioned to you over the phone, a way around the fiscal year issue is to use Job Costing to handle the “budgets” as estimates. The job would be the account, the phase the department, and the category the fiscal year.

It has the same ability to check that you are not entering a PO that would cause the budget to be exceeded.

Steve

Thanks to all you for your input.
I agree - the PO Event Tracking just does not appear to be able to handle the task of managing budget amounts, especially when considering different fiscal years. Too bad.

Steve, your solution of using JobCosting with PO is nice, and I see that it will work over fiscal years as well.

The issue that I am concerned about is that the users for this application are not Adagio power users. If there are a number of rules and steps that have to be performed from time to time, I am concerned that they may get messed up.
For example, every time that they would adjust the Budget values in the GL (which I know will happen), they would have to reimport or update the values in the accompanying JC Estimates.