iBudgets

Modifications may be for planning purposes only or for actual changes when accompanied by iJournals Fund Transfers. Only 3XXXX, 4XXXX, and 5XXXX Expenditure Types are allowed for iBudgets transactions. To learn more about the budget process, refer to Topic Overview: Stanford’s Budget Process.

Types of Transactions

New/Increase/Decrease Journal

Used for creating budgets (expense control) for new PTAs, or for increasing or decreasing existing budgets (expense control). These iBudgets journals are for planning purposes and only affect Expense Control information on Expenditure Detail Reports. New/Increase/Decrease journals do not have to balance. 

Reallocation Journal

Used to move budget (expense control) amounts from one PTA to another or from one expenditure type to other expenditure types. Reallocation journals have to balance (“From” equals “To”) and no more than two PTAs may be used, although one side of the transaction may include many different expenditure types if the other side only includes one expenditure type.
 
Transactions may be for planning purposes only or may be coupled with a related fund transfer journal to move expense control and actual funding. 

Upload Journals

Enables upload of journals from an Excel spreadsheet to the database using a preformatted template. Upload journals may be used with any of the iBudgets journal types. Upload journals do not allow the automatic creation of a Fund Transfer entry in iJournals.

Transaction Approval Process

When a journal is created, iBudgets automatically selects appropriate approvers based on the awards involved in the journal. The list of approvers appears on the Routing List screen during the journal creation process.

• Authority for approving iBudgets is shown in Authority Manager as Financial Systems/Approval/Budget Control. For more information, refer to Topic Overview: Financial Transaction Approval.
• The originator cannot change or delete approvers' names that automatically appear on the routing list. To comply with department policy, approvers may be added.
• Journals require approvals for all awards involved, e.g. the From and the To of a reallocation journal.
• If the journal originator has sufficient authority to approve the transaction they do not need to add any approver, however the system will automatically add an end route as noted below.
• The system will automatically end the approval routing (i.e., End Route) with the Budget Officer(s) responsible for the award-owning organization(s).
• Approvers do not have the option of modifying the journal. If an approver finds anything wrong with a journal, they must reject the journal in order to return it to the originator for modification and re-routing.
• The department originator and approver are responsible for ensuring that the expenditures are appropriate under the terms of the award.
• Sponsor's award terms and conditions take precedence unless they are less restrictive than Stanford's policy.

To learn more about the approval process, refer to Topic Overview: Financial Transaction Approval.

Journals Awaiting Approval at Month-End

Journal originators are responsible for monitoring the approval status of their journals. Journals must be completely approved, including end-routes, by the cut-off date each month to be included in the month's activities. For more information, refer to Topic Overview: Month-End Close, the Month-End Close Schedule.

At the end of each month, the Financial Management Consulting & Support – Systems and Reporting Operations (S&RO) group will change the period of any unapproved journals in the system to the following month (i.e., the period for any November journals not approved by the cut-off will automatically be changed to December). An unapproved journal will remain active in the system until it is fully approved.