Overview
In order for communities to attract new members and keep providing value to existing members, they need to invest in the community experience through events, speakers and education (to name a few). The expense associated with these investments is typically covered by the organization, which needs transparent tools to manage budgets that also show the return of these investments.
Budgeting for Communities on the Chronus platform is a flexible, transparent tool that allows the owners of these communities to set overall budget, allocate to each community, approve expenses. And, most importantly, stakeholders can see the return of their investment in communities by overlaying budget reporting with impact reporting.
Why it matters: With transparent budgeting, community owners have visibility into what community leads are investing in. Leads have an easy system to submit expenses, saving them time. And both benefit from being able to prove the ROI of their communities.
Key Benefits:
Owners can allocate and manage budgets
Leads can submit expenses, and owners can track and approve them
Owners can see how the budget it used through an new budget dashboard. This, combined with the analytics on the ROI Impact Report dashboard show community ROI
Getting Started & Feature Highlights
These features allows community owners to set budgets, and leads to submit expenses for approval.
Here’s a quick guide to accessing and configuring the budgeting feature:
How to Create a Communities Budget
On the global communities level follow this navigation path: Budget > Manage Budgets
Click the "New Budget" button. Next, you will see a form to set your budget.
Budgets are tied to specific timeframes (annual or quarterly) for better tracking. Owners can select the timeframe that aligns with when they set budgets.
Global Community Owners can now set budgets and allocate them to different communities.
Owners have flexible budget allocation among communities, ensuring accurate financial planning. Owners can also easily split budget equally amongst all communities.
Submitting Expenses
Once a budget is set, community leads can submit expenses through a Budget tab in their sidebar. From the left navigation menu, they will select Budget and click on Add Expense.
This will open a popup where they will:
Select a budget
Add a description
Add the amount
Select a spending category
Select the company's community pillar
Add Notes
Attach an receipts, quotes or invoices
Approving, Adjusting or Denying An Expense
When a new expense has been submitted, community owners can approve, adjust or deny the expense by following this navigation path: Budget > Expenses.
From here they can all expenses, including those that need approval.
To respond to a new expense, owners will click on the pending expense and choose to approve, request a change or decline the expense.
It is recommended that the owner include a note, that will be sent to the lead that submitted the expense in an email.
