Budget Settings, Commitments and Breaches

Behind the budget lines sit three things a finance team configures once and then reads: each company's budget settings, the commitments every order has made against a budget, and the breaches the budget check recorded. Together they decide how hard budgets bite and show what they would have stopped.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → ERP - Finance:

Budget Settings — per company: default enforcement, what happens to spend with no budget, and when a commitment is released
Commitments — every movement that consumed or released a budget, append-only
Budget Breaches — what the check allowed in Warn mode and what it refused; the badge counts breaches nobody overrode
Budgets — the budget lines

Admin Panel → Finance:

Ledger & Finance — the Budgets tab, which shows each company's settings above its budget lines

Budget settings

One row per company, with a row for company 0 as the default for every company without its own.

Default Check Mode: the enforcement a budget line uses when it says Company default. Warn unless you change it.
Unbudgeted Mode: what happens to spend no budget line covers. Warn by default; blocking it on day one would stop every requisition, because nobody has written a budget for stationery yet.
Relieve At: whether an order stops consuming budget when the goods are received or when the bill arrives. It must match where your posting rules recognise the cost, or the budget counts it twice. A service bought without a goods receipt, where its match policy does not need one, is relieved at the bill either way.
Include Requisitions: whether a requisition commits budget as well as an order. It stops a second requisition for the same money.
Requisition Expiry Days: how long a requisition's commitment is held if it is never ordered. The Budget Housekeeping task releases it after that.

Setting a company up

Open Budget Settings and add a row for the company, or edit company 0 for everyone.
Leave Default Check Mode and Unbudgeted Mode on Warn while budgets are being written.
Set Relieve At to match your posting rules: receipt if stock and costs post at goods receipt, invoice if they post at the bill.
If you turn on Include Requisitions, enable the Budget Housekeeping task (daily) so forgotten requisitions release their budget.
Write the budget lines on the Budgets tab of Ledger & Finance.

Commitments

Every order that commits budget, every receipt or bill that relieves it and every closed order that gives the balance back is a row in Commitments. Open commitment is the sum of these rows, so nothing there edits an amount: a correction is another movement. Read and investigate here; commit through the document lifecycle, never by adding rows. Reversing a goods receipt also reverses the budget relief it made.

Breaches

Budget Breaches lists what the check allowed through because it was in Warn mode, and what it refused. A breach is recorded when the move is actually attempted, not when someone only views an over-budget draft. This is how you find out what a budget would have stopped before you switch it to Block.

What goes wrong

A budget counts spend twice: Relieve At does not match where the cost is posted.
Requisitions hold budget for ever: Include Requisitions is on and Budget Housekeeping is not enabled.
Everything is refused: Unbudgeted Mode is Block and lines are missing.

Worked example

A company posts costs when goods are received, so Relieve At stays on receipt. It turns on Include Requisitions with 60 Requisition Expiry Days and enables Budget Housekeeping. After a quarter on Warn, Budget Breaches shows 14 breaches, 12 of them on two cost centres whose budgets were set too low. The controller corrects those two lines, then changes the company's Default Check Mode to Block.

Recommendations

Start every company on Warn, and read Budget Breaches monthly.
Agree Relieve At with whoever owns the posting rules.
Never edit Commitments; correct the document instead.
Enable Budget Housekeeping whenever requisitions commit budget.