Friday Feature – Percentage Adjustments to Budget Line Items

Friday the 13th is not a “bad luck” day.  It’s a budget day! As you remember, last week I touched upon the Perform Change task and how it worked with the Replace Budget Items flag. Over the next few weeks, I am going to dive into the Affect Salaries flag, which provides you with options on which type of salary items you want to affect (salaries, vacancies, manual entries) and what source (actual or projection).
As we discussed last week, you can make mass changes to your budget in the Budget Management activity using the Perform change task. There are over a dozen tasks, each with their own purpose and flags for changing your budget in just the right way.

Four of the Perform Change tasks (Percentage Adjustment, Load Salaries, Load Vacancies and Recompute Salaries) support the Affect Salaries flag. I am going to cover each task, one per week, describing how the flag affects the individual budget line items.

First up is the Percentage Adjustment change, which adjusts selected budget accounts by a percentage (negative or positive!). Customers use this type of change during bargaining unit (BU) negotiations to try out different scenarios. (And, of course, when negotiations are over and you have a final percent adjustment!)

There are four options for the Affect Salaries flag in the Percentage Adjustment change:

Actuals Only – You might want to use this when the BU is talking about a one-time retro. This option will affect only salaries that were locked in before they were loaded into budget.*

Both Actuals and Projections – You might want to use this when the negotiations include a retro and future salaries. This is going to affect all budget items (salaries and vacancies), regardless of source (locked in or not!).

Projections Only – You might want to use this option if the retro is off the table and only future salaries will be affected. In other words, any salaries that have been locked in will not be affected, but “open” salaries and vacancies will be.

Do Not Affect Salaries – You might want to use this when you are completely blue-skying these negotiations and you are only concerned about benefits. You haven’t loaded salaries or any other amounts. All you have done is key in or import some dollar amounts for a handful of benefit accounts. This option is only going to affect those items.

The best part about performing this change? There is no good luck or bad luck.  There is only you, doing your job, using Escape Online to create a budget. Heck, you know what you’re doing and Escape Online helps you by automatically recomputing benefit accounts/amounts, even creating those accounts, if they do not already exist (and you are setup to automatically create accounts as defined on the Ledger tab of the Organization record).

* Escape Online also supports importing and hand-entering manual salary and benefit items that can be defined as actual.