Overview of Budgets and Forecasts users
The information on this page refers to budgets but it also applies to forecasts.
There are three types of users in the Budgets and Forecasts module:
Owner
The budget owner is the user who creates the budget workbook and has overall control of that budget and its workflow. Owners can perform all actions in the budget. Ownership can be changed; administrators can become owners during part of the budget process to control the workflow, as required.
To be eligible to be a budget owner, you need to have the Manage Budgets and Forecasts permission assigned to your Phocas user profile. You also need permission to access to the relevant database(s).
Users who have a Viewer license cannot be an owner of a workbook but they can be an administrator and/or a contributor.
Administrator
The budget owner can add administrators to the budget workbook, for the purpose of delegating tasks and assisting with the workflow management. Administrators have additional permissions within the budget workbook compared to general users (contributors). In addition to the standard data entry, administrators can change the budget owner to themselves, add comparison rows, assign tasks in the workflow (but not change the workflow baseline, which is the owner), add drivers and publish driver tabs (where applicable).
A budget administrator is different to a Phocas site administrator. The Phocas site administrator controls who can access a database and what information they can see within a database.
A budget administrator is different to a headcount administrator. This separation of tasks is an additional layer of security to protect the privacy of your employee headcount data. See Manage Headcount driver users for more information.
Contributor
Users that are assigned to tasks in the workflow are known as contributors. They are responsible for entering the budget values in the worksheet. In general, the database permissions are carried through to the budget, so users can only view rows (budget lines) corresponding to those databases, for which they have been assigned tasks in the workflow.
Viewer
The budget owner and/or administrators can add users to a workbook as viewers. This is useful if you want to allow one or more users to view the budget but not contribute to it (edit any values). In general, the database permissions are carried through to the workbook, so users can only view rows (budget lines) for which they have permission.