• Allows organizations to set up a detailed financial plan.

• Allows organizations to check actual activity to the planned activity each fiscal period.

• Provides a much improved basis for variance analysis throughout the year.

• Improves the clarity of the organization's financial reports to external parties and campus administration.

• Reporting auxiliary and service centers must input a monthly budget during budget construction (document referenced below).

• If material adjustments to the monthly budget become necessary during the year due to unforeseen timing differences then these can be processed on a Budget Adjustment Document (document referenced below).

• Only material and/or seasonal items need to be budgeted on a monthly basis. Remaining items can be left for the system to spread evenly across the twelve periods. [Currently, the auxiliary reports are programmed to use the monthly budget, submitted by the department. If the department has not submitted a monthly budget, the report uses the current budget (annual) divided equally by twelve months].

• With the permission of the campus, the budget can be set up quarterly, rather than monthly to accommodate quarterly variance analysis. For example, the three periods of data in each quarter can be summed and entered into periods 3, 6, 9 and 12.

Seasonal refers to income and expense items that fluctuate widely on a monthly basis.

Budget Construction is the window of time (normally from March-June) when next year's budget can be entered into the FIS.

Current Budget (FIS Balance Type 'CB') is a copy of the base budget at July 1 that can be modified to reflect non-recurring items for the current fiscal year.

Monthly Budget (FIS Balance Type 'MB') is created when the current budget is manually allocated across fiscal periods to match expected monthly activity.

Budget Adjustment Document is an FIS document that allows organizations to reallocate items in their base, current and monthly budgets.