Budget management

What it is

Budget management helps you plan and control departmental budgets and track actual spend against them. A budget belongs to one department, covers a date range, and is built from line items. Once approved, people record real expenses against it, and Hubtoll compares spend to plan in real time.

Screens

• Overview — headline numbers (total allocated, total spent, remaining, over-budget count, pending approvals) plus charts: allocation-vs-spend, spend by category, per-budget utilisation, and a six-month spend trend.
• My departmental budgets — budgets for the departments you belong to.
• Active budgets — the approved budgets across the company.
• Budgets — one list for everyone: All shows the budgets you raised (your department's with a department permission; the whole company's with a budget permission), and Awaiting me shows budgets waiting on you.
• Budget detail — a health panel (allocated / spent / remaining / % used), the line items, the expenses, and an activity log.
• Workflow (BPM) — the budget approval chain.

Creating a budget

• Click New budget and set the title, start and end date, currency and department.
• Add your line items — each with a description, an amount, and a category (Salaries, Travel, Equipment, Software, Marketing, Training, Facilities, Professional services or Other). The budget's total is the sum of its line items.
• Submit — the budget enters the approval workflow and starts as pending.

Request a change on an approved budget raises a change request carrying your revision: the approved budget stays in force and keeps working normally, and the detail view shows the previous items alongside the proposed ones. When the change is approved it replaces the original — and the spend already logged against that budget comes with it, so utilisation is never reset by a revision.

Recording expenses

Once a budget is approved, add real spend against it with Log expense. Each expense has a category (with a free-text label when "Other"), a description, a payee, an amount, a date and an optional note. You can attach a receipt (PDF or common image formats). Expenses can be edited or deleted, and every change is written to the budget's activity log.

Budget vs actual

The detail view keeps a live tally: allocated, spent, remaining, variance and percentage used, plus spend by category. Warnings appear as you approach and exceed the plan:

• An amber notice at 90% or more used.
• A red "over budget by…" alert once spend passes the allocation.

Approvals

Budgets run on Hubtoll's approval workflow. An initiator submits, it routes through your configured steps, and approvers can Approve, Reject or Redirect. You need an active budget workflow before a budget can be created; if a workflow needs no approval, budgets are approved automatically.

Permissions

All actions require an active HR licence. Spend can be recorded by a company-wide budget editor, the budget's creator, or a member of the budget's department.

Good to know

• Overspend is always allowed and clearly flagged, never blocked.
• Expenses can only be logged against an approved budget.
• Categories are a fixed list; "Other" lets you add a free-text label.
• Headline money totals count approved budgets; the pending count and status breakdown cover everything.
• Receipts must be a PDF or a common image type.