New in Release 3.5: Financial Management with Budgets

Last updated on February 1st, 2023 at 3:04pm

Everyone budgets cloud spend differently. From simply aggregating spend to enforcing thresholds and budget allocations, our new budgeting system offers the flexibility to create a financial structure that perfectly suits your organization.

When working in the cloud, you track progress, measure variation, and make updates. Your financial management should work the same way. We make it easy to analyze and adjust. Our budgets aren’t static. They adapt and change.

Degrees of Budgeting

Our new budgeting system offers a modular approach to financial management. We offer many tools for various use cases, and you can choose which ones you would like to use. The way you configure these tools will move your financial management towards a more or less restrictive structure.

• Do you require a highly structured financial system where every penny has a planned purpose ahead of time? Budgeting with enforced funding sources, financial enforcements, and allocations might be right for you.
• Do you want to create buckets of money and track spend cumulatively rather than project by project? OU financial thresholds could be your answer. Add in financial enforcements based on your thresholds, and you never need to worry about overspending.
• Do you want to track your spend without planning anything beforehand? Even if you don’t set up budgets, OU thresholds, or funding sources, you can still easily see your spend data and track where your money is going. Why force restrictions where they don’t make sense?
  

Your New Financial Toolbox

Each of our financial tools can be used alone or in combination with any other, so you can customize your system exactly how you like it.

Funding Sources

While funding sources are not a new concept in Kion, they have been upgraded in this release. Depending on what system settings are on or off, they can be used in more or less restrictive ways.

Rather than imposing a certain level of restrictiveness, you can choose how restrictive you want them to be. You get to decide if they have to have funds allocated to them and if they are enforced globally or only used in specific places. And, for the first time ever, funding sources are now optional.

• Do you want to use funding sources? With budgets, funding sources are optional. If your organization wants to associate funding sources to project-level budgets, you can. If not, you can create project-level budgets without funding sources. It’s that simple. If you choose not to use funding sources, your accumulated spend will still be totaled and calculated against any OU thresholds or budgets you have created.

• Where do you use funding sources? When using funding sources, you no longer need to set them at a top-level OU. Funding sources can be available to all projects in your organization or attached to specific OUs, limiting their use to projects descending from selected OUs.

• How are funds allocated? When using funding sources with budgets, you have the option of enabling allocations mode. When allocations are on, funding sources function the same way they did with spend plans. When allocations are off, however, associating a budget with a funding source is optional. You can attribute funds to budgets instead of drawing funds from funding sources.

Project Budgets

A project budget is a way to track and estimate spending from the project level. Budgets provide options for multiple budgets based on your OUs, projects, and accounts; annual, quarterly, and monthly planning; and on-the-fly edits. Funding sources, top-down allocations, and even budgets themselves are optional.

• Granularity. With budgets you can set funding values on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, or custom basis. Get as granular as you like, setting fixed values for individual months, or let us create a cumulative budget for your selected time frame. And if different projects call for different approaches, it’s easy to create different budgets with different levels of specificity.

• Transparency. We offer the ability to create multiple budgets and a robust reporting system, so you can see a complete picture of your financial status. By creating budgets based on spending, project, or funding time frames, you can create detailed reports on your spend history. You can also easily report on actual spend versus budgeted amount, making it easier to plan future budgets.

OU Thresholds

An OU financial threshold is a way to track and estimate spending from the OU level. They are set on OUs and represent the maximum cumulative spend by projects descending from that OU. You can set amounts per month and view aggregate descendant project spending.

Thresholds can be used with or without project-level budgets. When used alone, they are useful for monitoring project spend at a high-level without setting up individual project budgets. You may want to take this approach if you don't want to monitor individual projects, but you do want to control what they spend cumulatively.

Enforcements and Savings Opportunities

While financial enforcements and savings opportunities aren’t new to Kion, they are essential tools in your financial toolbox.

• Financial enforcements. Project budgets and OU thresholds include notifications when resources overspend. With enforcements, you can automate what remediation action should be taken when one of those notifications is triggered. For more information, see What is a Financial Enforcement Action?

• Savings opportunities. Kion's cost optimization features continually scan your environment, helping identify opportunities to save on your cloud bill. For more information, see What is a Savings Opportunity?

How to Get Started with Budgets

We’ve made it easy to switch from spend plans to budgets. Four steps is all it takes! Migrating will preserve your financial history for reporting and planning purposes. For information on migrating, see Migrating from Spend Plans to Budgets.

For detailed information on all of our financial features, see the Financials section of our success center.

That’s Not All! 

These are just the highlights! For details on all of our new features, changes, and bug fixes, read the full release notes on our Support Center. 

If you're new to Kion, welcome! You can schedule a free demo to learn more about our comprehensive cloud enablement software. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more cloud enablement news.