Spending is a feature that encompasses budget tracking and expense logging for your projects. It is highly configurable depending on your needs. This article lists and explains each configuration option.
To access these settings, Admin level users can navigate to Settings > Spending
Project Spending Feature: enable or disable the entire project spending feature
Expense Status: enable or disable the option for statuses on expense items. Statuses are uses to indicate an expense item's progress through your internal purchasing or acquisitions process. Use this feature if you need to track approval or other statuses from a purchasing prospective. Enabling Expense Status will prompt you to enter Status names and Descriptions so you can customize this feature based on your own acquisition process.
Budget Line-Items: allows for budgets to be created prior to purchasing an item. The total budgeted can be compared to the expenses costs accrued to date. Optionally, you can set a review process with the Budget Proposal Workflow. Enabling Budget Line Items prompts you to select if you wish to enable Budget Proposal Workflow as well.
Budget Proposal Workflow: applies an approval process to Budgets so that Students can propose a budget and Instructors or Admins can approve or decline (and provide comments). Instructors or Admins can even decline individual budget items while approving the rest of the budget, or it can be declined altogether and sent back to students to resubmit.
Project Budget Field and Project Budget Amount: allows a budget amount to be set for your projects and allows users to identify remaining budget against their current expenditures. You can set an amount to apply to all projects in the Project Budget Amount field below or you can leave this blank and allow instructors and admins to set the budget amount for each project. Even if you do set a Project Budget Amount here to apply to all projects, you (or another Admin/Instructor) can overwrite this in the individual project's Spending tab.
Student and Instructor Defined Categories: this allows new budget categories to be created from within the project (as opposed to in the Settings page) by Instructors and Students. Warning: enabling this means any category created by a Student or Instructor on one project, will show up in other projects as an available category.
Statuses: create Statuses that your expense items can progress through to accommodate an internal acquisitions process.
Accounts: use Accounts to link budget and expense items with internal billing accounts used by your school.
Categories: group budget items and expenses under a category designation, which may be helpful for reporting in the future.
Statuses, Accounts and Categories are all driven by your own custom entries. Admins create these items and they can be deleted, edited, reordered or archived for future use with the buttons shown below: