Working with a Maintenance Budget

Maintenance Budget List

The maintenance budget list mainly focusses on dimensions. The list is showing budget name and description followed by five built-in dimensions that offer easy access to working with maintenance dimensions. The budget module also integrates with Business Central standard dimensions. Finally, the maintenance budget list allows the user to indicate if the current budget to block the current budget.

Budget list mainly focus on Dimensions

Viewing a Maintenance Budget

To view a budget, you open the maintenance budget list, mark a budget, and click Edit Budget. The Budget card now opens with three areas:

• General where budgets attributes are set to determine how lines and columns are shown - weather to view the budget by day / week / month / year, how to show and round amounts, and so on.
  • View By: Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year, Accounting Period
  • Show Amount: Resource Cost, Item Cost, Expense Cost, Total Cost
  • Rounding Factor: 1, 1000, 1000000
• Maintenance Budget Matrix that lists budget lines. Each budget line can have costs spread over each month in the budget year (Jan.-Dec.).
• Filters that allow the user to zoom in on a specified date range, group of assets / asset categories / asset locations, maintenance types, and more.
  • Filters will only show data when there are budget entries that match the filter.
  • When you create a new budget and apply a filter, the filter will often times hide all entries - usually because no entries match the filter.

Edit Budget - Total Cost by Year

Edit Budget - Resource Cost by Month

Edit Budget - Item Cost by Month

Edit Budget - Expense Cost by Month

Create or Modify a Maintenance Budget

Creating a budget manually is the straight-forward way to get started with maintenance budgetting in EAM-BC. You create a budgets for a time period by first giving it a budget name ("Production Line 2 - 2025") and then entering budget figures. The budget name is now added to all lines in your budget. Enter your budget amounts on each line. Help for each field is available.

Modifying budget entries can be done at any time, except on a blocked budget. To enter budget entries, you mark a field in the Budget Matrix area and enter the number. To change budget entries, overwrite the existing budget entries.

The General tab determine how budget entries are added. In the screenshot, budget entries are added to the Dimension "Asset Category", period "January 2021", and Amount type "Item Cost". Change the General tab to enter for other dimensions and periods. The Filters tab help you zoom in on, say, a period and Asset Group. When using Filters, only matching budget entries are shown in the budget matrix.

Dimensions are core to the budget module. It is recommended to have at least one dimension (to give EAM-BC data that it can aggregate on). Oftentimes, you have two or more dimensions, depending on your financial reporting and cost controlling needs. Read more in the maintenance budget dimension-section.

Entering Resource Costs in a budget

Create multiple maintenance budgets

Multiple budgets can be created for the same time period. It's done by adding budgets with unique names ("Production Line 1 - 2025", "Production Line 2 - 2025", "Warehouse - 2025") and then entering budget figures. The budget name is now added to all lines in your budget.

Enter your budget amounts on each line. Help for each field is available.

Filter Budget Entries

Filter budgets by parameters that makes sense when working with maintenance budgets, including:

• Date Filter - Show only entries for a period ("01/01/21..31/12/21"). While most people choose to create yearly budgets, it is possible for budgets can span many years and in such cases Date Filters help zoom in on the current budget period.
• Asset Filter
• Asset Category Filter
• Asset Location Filter
• Maintenance Type Filter
• Work Order Category
• Asset Group Filter
• Item Group Filter
• Resource Group Filter
• Budget Dimension - Filter entries by Dimensions when the budget entries have Dimensions.

Copy Maintenance Budget

Copying last years budget (or other period) is a common practice when creating a new Maintenance Budget. With the budget module, you can speed up the budgetting process with these capabilities:

• Use budget (Maintenance Budget Entries) or ledger entries (Work Order Ledger Entries) as source for the new budget.
• Copy budget entries in full or in part. To filter the copied parts, you filter with Asset No., Asset Category, Asset Location, Maintenance Type, Work Order Category, and Date Period.
• Adjust the new budget with an Adjustment Factor. when entering 1.2, entries in the new budget increase by 20%.
• Date Change Formula. It just dates in the new budget. Enter +1Y to set the dates one year ahead.

Why do Assets in my copied budget not have values?

• Most likely, your Assets changed since the source budget was created.
• Commissioned Assets. When copying a budget, new Assets may have been created since the "copied budget" was originally created. The copied budget will show these Assets, but they will not have values (you will need to specify values for any new Assets).
• Decommissioned Assets should be removed from the copied budget. Values from sold or scrapped Assets will be included in a copied budget.

Modifying the copied budget entries in Excel makes changes a breeze. Learn more in the import / export section.