Can I set budgets at category group level?

You may wish to set up budgets at category group level. For example, allocate £500 for the whole students ministry for the year, rather than £200 for catering, £200 for transport, and £100 for guest speaker fees.

This isn't possible in ExpensePlus for a few good reasons:

1. If budgets were set by category group, your organisation would not be able to compare income and expenditure to budget or forward project income and expenditure at a more detailed level.
2. Some features of ExpensePlus such as Projects and Category Connectors, which link categories from different groups and funds, would not work as expected if budgets were assigned only at category group level.
3. Whilst you may set your overall budget at category group level, there is still a benefit for the person managing each budget to allocate this at a category level. Furthermore, when viewing income and expenditure at a category level, you need to compare this to budgets at the same level too.

This said, most organisations do take a pragmatic approach when viewing Income and Expenditure reports. They wouldn't be too concerned with one particular category under or overspending if the total spend of category group was still on track.

So, just because you set a budget for each category, you can still compare budgets at a category group level if you prefer.

To better understand the Finance Reports module, please view the module overview video here.