Project Budget Workflow Suite
Put project budget approvals on a workflow — end the email chains and delays.
What problem does it solve?
Project budget and revision approvals often run on email and verbal agreement; who approved what amount and when stays unclear, approvals lag and there is no audit trail.
How does the solution work?
Conforcus's budget workflow suite routes project budget requests and revisions through SAP workflow on a defined approval hierarchy, recording each step, approver and rationale traceably.
What changes in practice?
The flow begins when a project budget request or a revision request is created in SAP together with its amount and rationale. SAP Workflow routes the request to the first approver in the defined approval hierarchy, and each approval starts the next step. The status of the request and its approval history are kept in the system. When the final approval is given, the update to the PS project budget is triggered automatically; until approval is complete the budget does not change. The project budget shown in the system therefore reflects the approved amount, with no manual transfer step between request and budget posting.
What changes for the project control and budget team is how approvals are followed up. The requester sees from the status at which step, and with whom, the request is waiting, and email chains and verbal agreements drop out. Approvers assess the requests that reach them together with the rationale, and their decisions are recorded. When audit or management questions a budget revision, the approval history shows who approved which amount and when. For the PMO, budget changes on all projects pass through the same hierarchy, so practice does not differ from project to project.
Benefits
- Budget approvals move on a defined hierarchy without delay
- Full traceability of who approved what and when
- An auditable flow replaces email and verbal sign-off
Where it sits in SAP
Integrated with PS project budgeting and SAP Workflow; routes budget/revision requests through the approval hierarchy, keeps status and approval history and triggers the budget update after approval. Proven in project-intensive organizations.
Who it is for: Project Control & Budget Manager, PMO, CFO
Frequently asked questions
Which budget operations in PS does the budget workflow cover?
The suite covers project budget requests and the revision requests relating to that budget; each is routed through the defined approval hierarchy. The PS project budget is not updated until approval is complete; a budget change takes effect as the outcome of the approval flow. How many steps the approval hierarchy has and who approves is defined during setup according to the organization's authority structure.
What does the system do on a budget overrun, and how does this relate to standard availability control?
The suite governs how the budget changes; comparing spending with the budget is the job of standard availability control in PS. Because the budget is updated only after approval, availability control works against the approved budget, and postings that exceed it are caught by that control. When additional budget is needed, a revision request is raised with its rationale, passes through the approval hierarchy and updates the budget once approved.
How do we see afterwards who approved what and when, and what happens to rejected requests?
Status and approval history are kept for every request: each step, the approver and the rationale are on record. Since the budget update is triggered only when approval is complete, a rejected or pending request does not change the project budget. In an audit or a management query, how a budget amount came about is shown from this history, without searching through email correspondence.