Business Need

Many organizations manage budgets at a business-category level rather than at individual Main Account level.

For example, a budget may be allocated to a specific combination of financial dimensions (such as Business Unit, Brand, Department, Project, etc.) and should be shared across multiple expense accounts belonging to the same spending category.

Under this approach, all transactions posted to the accounts within the category should consume from a common budget pool and be validated against the remaining budget available for the entire group.

Current Limitation

Budget groups in Budget Control currently rely on Main Account criteria defined through ranges ("is between and includes").

This design works well when related accounts are consecutive. However, in many real-world implementations, accounts belonging to the same business category are non-sequential and cannot be efficiently represented through account ranges.

As a result:

• Customers must create multiple budget groups or complex workarounds.
• Budget monitoring becomes difficult and less intuitive.
• Budget consumption cannot be easily tracked against a single business-category budget.
• Maintenance effort increases whenever accounts need to be added or removed from the group.

Requested Enhancement

Introduce support for defining Budget Control groups using an explicit list of Main Accounts or an Account Group object, instead of only account ranges.

The enhancement should allow customers to:

• Define a logical account group containing multiple non-sequential Main Accounts.
• Combine the account group with financial dimensions as budget control criteria.
• Allocate a single budget amount to the group.
• Have transactions posted to any account within the group consume from the same budget pool.
• Perform budget validation against the group's remaining balance rather than against each account individually.
• Maintain account membership within the group without redesigning budget control structures.

Expected Benefits

• Align Budget Control with common budgeting practices used by finance organizations.
• Reduce configuration complexity and maintenance effort.
• Improve budget visibility at the business-category level.
• Eliminate workarounds for customers using non-sequential account structures.
• Provide greater flexibility for organizations managing budgets across multiple accounts that represent the same operational spending area.