What is a Project Spend Plan?
Kion offers two modes of financial management: budgets and spend plans. We recommend migrating to budgets at your earliest convenience.
If you have already built your organization around spend plans, budgeting with a highly restrictive structure functions very similarly but offers more customization and granularity. We recommend switching to budgeting with allocations mode and enforced funding sources if possible.
If you started using Kion before budgets were released in version 3.5.0, you can migrate from spend plans to budgets. For more information, see Migrating from Spend Plans to Budgets.
A project spend plan is the combination of funding sources, specific funding amounts, and start/end dates that determine the budget of a project. The information you enter in a project's spend plan will be used to calculate the following:
- Budget. A calculation based on the remaining funds assigned to a project divided by the number of months until the project can no longer use the funding source.
- Planned Rate. A linear calculation that determines the amount that would be spent in a day if the funds were evenly distributed throughout the allotted time.
Requirements
Funding sources must be created and funds allocated before spend plans can be created.
- Funding sources. Funding sources represent streams of money in your organization. They are commonly used to represent corporate budgets, contracts, or grants. For more information, see What is a Funding Source?
- Allocations. When using spend plans, allocations are always enabled. When allocations are enabled, your entire organization must use funding sources to allocate funds to OUs and projects. Allocations offer a high level of restriction and control over your funds. For more information, see Allocations Mode.
What Next?
Spend plans can be added to projects during project creation or afterward. If a project doesn’t have a spend plan, its spend is still tracked. However, Kion will not be able to show information that requires a planned amount of spend, such as on track and overspending notifications, lifespan, and forecasting. Some enforcement criteria will also be unavailable.
- To learn how to create a project spend plan while adding a project, see Create a Project.
- To learn how to add a spend plan to an existing project, see Add a Spend Plan to an Existing Project.