Friday Feature – Replace Budget Items

It is February and the time has come to buy flowers for your favorite budgeting person. What?! Yes, the crunch is on for creating next year’s budget and those budgeting gurus need a little extra love.
While Escape Online is not a love machine, it can make your February lovelier by loading salaries (including step/column changes) and benefits from HR/Payroll, loading actuals/revised account amounts from Finance, and importing account amounts from your spreadsheets. In fact, Escape Online supports over a dozen ways to load amounts into your budget, the majority of them conducted through the “Perform Change” task. Over the next few weeks, we will review some of the more advanced “Perform Change” features to help your budget bloom.

First up is the Replace Budget flag. This is a sweetheart of a feature, applying to importing and copying (change types 5-9).

It allows you to define how budget item records will be affected by the change!

Let’s say that Special Education entered their own budget figures and you want to apply those to a “master budget.” Let’s see how the three options might work.

Do Not Replace – Items in the selected component range from the source model are appended to the current model. No budget line items are deleted from the current model.

This means that whatever budget account line items the Special Education Department added will be added to your already existing items. So if they have one manual salary line item for account #123456 and you already have two line items for that account (one salary and one manual salary), after the change, you will have three line items (one salary and two manual salary).

Replace All Item Types – Items in the selected component range are deleted from the current model and items from the source are added.

Let’s continue with our example. After the change, you will have one item, the one from the Special Education Department’s budget. Your original two items for account #123456 are deleted.

Replace Same Item Types – Only items with the same type and component range are replaced. Accounts that do not have activity in the source will not affect the current model. In other words, budget accounts in the source that do not have line items will not force the deletion of budget line items in the matching budget accounts in the current model. However, zero amounts will replace items in the current model if the type matches.

One more time with our example. After the change, you will have one salary line item (from your original) and one manual salary (from the Special Education Department). In other words, the manual salary item from your original was replaced by the Special Education Department’s because it was the same item type for the same account.

Now, that’s a powerful flag, definitely a sweetheart of a feature!