Overview of access to budget workbooks

As your organization's financial and budget information is sensitive, your Phocas site administrator controls who can access the Budgets and Forecasts module and what they can see and do there. This security gives your organization the freedom to share and assign work as required, without having to worry about who can see what.

For example, when you are assigned to a task in a budget,

• If you are a Regional Manager of Australia and you can only see Australia (not UK and USA) in your organization’s Financial Statements, that same visibility applies to Budgets and Forecasts, so you will only see the budget items for Australia.

• If you are a Warehouse Manager, you might only be able to see the operating costs for your branch.

• If you are a member of the Sales team, you might only be able to see the Gross Margin and higher-level information.

In accordance with the examples above, the following factors impact your access to a budget workbook:

Database access

Your administrator manages who can access a database and what information they can see within that database. If your organization’s budget data comes from more than one database, they can set restrictions for multiple databases, for individual users or groups.

For example, your administrator can set a default restriction on a database, so users can see ‘branch data’ but not ‘company-wide data’.

User restrictions

If, for example, your organization only wants your local branch managers to see the data relating to their branch’s budgets, your administrator can restrict access, so that each manager only sees the information relevant to them. These restrictions can be customized at a very fine level and can be applied to one database at a time, for individual users or groups.

For example, a user can have access to the Cost of Sales data in one database but not in another.

Budgets and Forecasts permission

Administrators can give users permission to manage Budgets and Forecasts via a user profile setting. This setting allows users to become budget owners.

Budgets and Forecasts user type

In addition to the above restrictions, how you physically access a budget differs, depending on who you are and whether it is the first or subsequent time you access it. See Access a budget workbook.