As your Employee Resource Group (ERG) program grows, you may find your team of Group Leaders and Administrators being granted more funding by your organization to support the efforts of your ERGs; or your budget may be growing and it is becoming more challenging to manage and keep tabs on the money that each group has. No matter the scenario, if you find yourself wishing for an integrated budgeting tool to help your ERGs manage their budgets, our Budgets tool may be a great fit for your program.
The Budgets tool is a straightforward way for Administrators and Group Leaders to keep track of money being spent, and allow anyone to easily answer questions such as, “How much money do we have left to spend on swag?” or “How much money has the AAPI ERG spent so far this year?”
Adding the Budgets tool to your Employee Groups site is considered an enhancement. To ensure that these proposed additions meet your needs, it’s important for us to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how we can help you get there.
This guide will help you understand:
- Benevity Best Practices & Recommendations
- Who to involve
- Expected timeline & implementation activities
- Important project requirements & considerations
- Next steps
Benevity Best Practices & Recommendations
We find that our clients have the best post-launch outcomes by implementing Benevity’s best practices and recommendations. Here are some related to adding Budgets to your Employee Groups site:
- You do not have to allocate budgets to all of your ERGs at once, nor do you have to give each group the same amount of money to spend. The Budgets tool is completely flexible and each allocation can be set up to meet your needs.
- Once Budgets is enabled in your site, ERG Leaders will see Budgets added as a tab on their Dashboard, but will see no further information, until an allocation is made.
- Ensure you and your ERG leaders follow consistent expense approval procedures established by your Finance or Accounting departments to ensure there are no challenges with reimbursement.
- Our Budgets tool is great at keeping track of expenses, but there is no integration with any expense or payroll systems.
- Each allocation can be configured differently to require pre-approval if desired. However, if your program allows for ERGs to operate more independently, they will share spend requests with administrators as a way to communicate what is being spent, without requiring formal administrator approval.
- If your ERGs operate across multiple regions and in multiple currencies, choose a consistent currency for tracking spending within each allocation.
- ERG leaders can attach spending requests to relevant events to calculate an accurate cost per attendee.
- Provide timely, relevant training for all Group Leaders to ensure consistent use of the budgets tool across all ERGs.
- Group Leaders may have questions as they start using the Budgets tool. Having at least one person on the Program Administrator team that they can go to to get answers will be the key to a successful roll out of this feature.
Who to Involve
To set up Budgets you will need to involve the following people to complete activities during different phases of the implementation:
- Program Owner/Administrator: They will provide program requirements and details during the enhancement project, participate in training (if desired) to ensure understanding of how to effectively use the Budgets feature, as well as coordinate with Group Leaders during implementation and post-launch to support successful adoption and use going forward.
- Group Leaders: They will learn how to use the Budgets tool during training (if desired) and with Benevity's help documentation.
Expected Timeline & Implementation Activities
You can expect a Budgets enhancement to take between 2 - 4 weeks depending on your requirements. The following outlines the implementation phases and the estimated timeline for each phase. Use this to plan your project resourcing and training.
*training if applicable/desired
Activities in each phase
- Discovery
- Gather requirements
- Define scope
- Configure & Test
- Enable technical components
- Allocation configuration
- Training (if desired)
- Administrator training
- ERG Leader training
- ERG leader office hours
- Launch & Post Launch
- Roll out to all ERG Leaders
- Monitor usage
- Support
Important Project Requirements & Considerations
Before proceeding with the Budgets enhancement, ensure that you understand the following considerations:
- Once Budgets is turned “on” in your site, all Group Leaders will see a section on the Group Leader Dashboard entitled Budgets & Spending. However, until an allocation is made to the group, that section will be empty.
- All ERGs do not need to have a budget allocated to them and all allocations do not need to be the same across all ERGs.
- There is no staging environment for Employee Groups.
- The Budgets enhancement is complete once the Budgets tool is turned on and any training (if desired) is complete.
Next Steps
Now that you understand the Budgets tool and how we can enhance your Employee Groups site with the addition of Budgets, contact your Client Success Manager to get started. Please review this Scoping Questionnaire, as you will need to complete it before getting started. We also recommend sharing the enhancement information with the representatives listed above in the "Who to Involve" section
Enhancement Guides help you get a better understanding of what to expect, the people involved and the project requirements. They are a great resource for you to review with your teams while you prepare for the implementation.
You can also explore additional resources in the B-Hive to prepare for your Budgets enhancement:
Budget management in Employee Groups