Financial Management Methods

Kion makes it easy to set and enforce budgets, get current spend insight, and identify cost optimization opportunities. We give you cost visibility, control, and context across your organization. From allocating and automatically enforcing budgets to identifying savings opportunities, Kion helps ensure fiscal responsibility.

Kion offers two modes of financial management: budgeting and spend plans. Budgeting is more flexible, giving you the option to plan on a monthly basis with less restrictive guardrails. Spend plans are more rigid, and are useful if you are planning your spend based on limited funding sources, such as contracts or grants.

Budgeting is enabled by default when you first install Kion. 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.

Budgeting

Budgeting provides options for multiple project budgets based on your OUs, projects, and accounts; OU thresholds to track and enforce organization-wide spend; annual, quarterly, and monthly planning; and on-the-fly edits. Funding sources, top-down allocations, and even budgets themselves are optional.

Rather than forcing your organization into a pre-built financial model, we built budgets to be versatile. Enforce budgets on every project in your organization, or choose to set budgets only where necessary.

For more information, see Getting Started with Financial Management.

Spend Plans (Legacy)

Spend plans use specific funding amounts and dates to determine allowed spend for projects. They provide high consistency, but offer little flexibility or granularity. We only recommend using spend plans if your funding comes from contracts/grants and you must completely use the funding from one before beginning to use the next.

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.

For more information, see Managing Project Spend Plans.