Create and allocate a learning budget

What this achieves

A learning budget records what you have to spend on training in a fiscal year and tracks what has gone. Budgets nest, so a department’s share is drawn from the company figure rather than sitting beside it.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Create the company-wide budget first. A department or employee budget is allocated out of a parent, and the screen tells you to create a company budget before it will let you create anything else.

Steps

1. Go to Learning → Budgets.
2. Select Create Budget.
3. Choose the Scope.
4. Where the scope needs one, choose the Department or the Employee.
5. Set the Fiscal Year.
6. Enter the Total Amount.
7. Select Create Budget.

Scope

Option	Description
Company-wide	One figure for the organization, and the parent of everything else.
Department	A share allocated to a named department, drawn from the company budget.
Employee	A share allocated to a named person, drawn from the budget above them.

Example: allocating shares to Engineering, Sales, Operations, Finance, and People at HC Corp UK Ltd gives each department a ceiling of its own and leaves the rest available at company level.

The amount field states its own unit

The Total Amount field is labelled with the unit it expects and tells you what it does with the figure: it is entered as a whole amount and stored in the smallest currency unit.

Enter the figure the field asks for rather than the one you had in mind. An amount entered in the wrong unit is wrong by a factor of a hundred, and every derived figure — remaining, utilisation, available to allocate — carries the same error without looking odd.

An allocation cannot exceed its parent

Where an amount is more than the parent has left, the screen refuses it and names the parent and the amount available.

Check Available to allocate on the hierarchy before promising a department anything. That column, rather than the parent’s total, is what you have left to give.

One budget per scope per year

A second budget for the same scope and the same fiscal year is refused as a conflict, and the screen offers to open the existing one.

Where more money is agreed part-way through a year, change the existing budget rather than adding another beside it.

Reading the hierarchy

Option	Description
Entity	The company, a department, or a person.
Total	The budget held at that level.
Available to allocate	What is left to give to levels beneath.
Spent	What has gone.
Remaining	What is left to spend.
Utilization	Spend as a proportion of the total.

Rows also show what has been allocated to children and to employees, and a budget that has been overspent is marked as exceeded.

Read utilisation together with the calendar. Half a budget spent in the first month of a fiscal year is a different situation from half spent in the tenth.

When there is no budget for a year

The screen says so for the year you are looking at rather than showing an empty table, and offers to create one. A year with no budget is not an error — it is a year nobody has budgeted yet.

What happens next

Spend reaches these budgets through training that carries a cost, including external training requests that route for approval. Once budgets exist, an approver can see what a request would consume before agreeing to it, and the utilisation figures tell you whether your training plan and your training spend are the same plan.

Related

• Setup Considerations: learning budgets
• Read learning reports
• Training Directory
• Learning