Viewing budgets in Spark

Budgets allow you to limit company spending for different parts of your program. You can view your annual budget amounts and usage in Spark to track and compare current and historical company spending. You also have visibility into all changes made to a budget. Benevity Reporting is available to answer additional company spending questions.

Before you begin

Anyone with the budget manager role can view budgets in Spark. All current change signatories are automatically assigned the budget manager role. Program admins with the role manager role can assign the budget manager role to other users in the future.

View budget data

You can view your annual budget amounts and usage in Spark to track and compare current and historical company spending. Non-payroll transactions have an approximate two-hour time lag to be included in budget usage. Payroll transactions are included according to the payroll schedule. 

Go to Manage > Budgets to view your budget data.

Budgets are sorted by % used by default, however, you can sort them by any column by selecting the column header.

The table displays the following budget details:

• Budget Name
• Start & End Dates indicate the budget period.
• Status indicates if the budget is active, expired, or has not started.
• Donation Currency of the transactions included in the budget.
• Budget Total is the total amount authorized for a budget.
• Per user total is the total budget amount an individual user has access to (matching, volunteer rewards or a combination of both).
• Budget usage is how much of the budget has been used in the budget period.
  • Budget usage does not include:
    
    • Non-committed payroll.
    • External match requests in the queue.
    • Volunteer submissions in the queue.
    • Expired rewards and seeding.
    • Subscription fees.
• % used calculates budget usage as a percentage of the budget total.

View budgets by year

You can select a year from the budget year drop-down to view all budget data for that year. The default year is typically the current calendar year. If your program does not run on a standard calendar year, the default year is based on your current fiscal year-end. You can view historical, current, and future budget setup and usage if available.

Export budget data

You can export budget data in XLSX or CSV format:

1. Select Manage > Budgets in the top right corner of your program.
2. Select a budget year from the dropdown.
3. Select Export.
4. Select your preferred format.

Note: When you export budget data, all your budgets for that year are included in the export file.

Budget reports in Benevity Reporting

The below reports supplement information viewed in budgets. They are accessed through Benevity Reporting.

1. Budget Usage
   Similar to the information viewed in Budgets.
2. Budget Usage by Transaction
   
   A line-by-line breakdown of the transactions that are drawn down from each budget.
3. Budget Usage by User
   The amount of budget that has been used from each budget line, per user.
4. Matching Campaign Usage 
   This report shows Matching budget types and any additional matching campaigns that have been set up throughout the year. The "draws from budget" column indicates if the campaign transactions are associated with a budget. If they are not, the campaign is stand-alone and does not draw down from a budget.

Note that data will become available in the Budgets view around 2 hours after it is available in stock reporting.