Within Project Management and Accounting you have the ability to create an original budget against a project, this is key management information and allows business to assess and make informed decisions. Further to this each month a budget revision can be made allowing you to accept the costs in a period and re-balance budgets if required.

Unfortunately when you create a budget revision you cannot process transactions against most 365 modules including general ledger, stock, procurement, expenses, timesheet's etc until the open budget revision is approved.

This impacts day to day BAU activities, there is a genuine requirement for businesses to have open budget revisions across a number of days, this includes a business review and approval process via workflow that can span more than 24 hours.

In addition to BAU activities which cannot be transacted due to open budget revisions nightly system batch jobs are also affected and fail.

Business financial information can therefore quickly become out of date and no longer real time.

The underlying issue being that if a cost category which was not included in the original budget or any previous revisions now incurs a charge, computer says NO to the posting regardless of the type of posting eg. Bank, GL, Procurement etc etc

Our Idea being that irrespective of what was included in the original budget you enforce warning messages when trying to post to a cost category that was not in the original budget and not a hard stop. The user can then review the warning message and continue to post if applicable, BAU activities can continue and no disruption occurs within the business. All costs are reviewed as part of the monthly business process.