If you want to track the variance of your actual balances from budget, and you have more than 12 accounting periods per financial year, you will need customize the Budgets and Balances object and page to make them compatible with your company's financial calendar.
To customize the budgets and balances page:
- From Setup, click Create | Objects and then select the Budget and Balance custom object.
- Add the appropriate custom fields for the Actual section. These must include actual fields and should also include year-to-date fields for every trading period in the financial year.
- Add the appropriate custom fields for the Budget section. These should include budget and year-to-date budget fields for every trading period in your financial year.
- Add the appropriate custom fields for the Variance section. These should include variance and year-to-date variance fields for every trading period in your financial year.
- Customize the page layout of your budgets and balances page to add, or move, any new fields to the appropriate sections. See "Customizing Page Layouts ..." in the Salesforce Help for more information.
See "Adding Fields" and "Building Formulas" in the Salesforce Help for information on how to do this.
Salesforce Edition Limitations
Salesforce only support a limited number of custom fields per object. This limit varies depending on the Salesforce Edition you have installed in your organization. See "Salesforce Editions and Limits" in the Salesforce Help for more details.
The result of this is that you must be running Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition to use FinancialForce Accounting.
The addition of a single additional period involves the creation of 12 custom fields (6 for home currency and 6 for dual currency). Consequently, the number of additional periods that you can add to the Budgets and Balances object is limited by which Salesforce Edition you have licensed.
The following guidelines assume that the Budgets and Balances object is as installed (188 custom fields) and that you have not added any other custom fields.
- Enterprise Edition has a limit of 500 custom fields per object. This means that you can add another 26 sets of periods (12 x 26 = 312 more custom fields) making up to 38 periods in total.
- Unlimited Edition has a limit of 800 custom fields per object. This means that you can add up to another 51 sets of periods (12 x 51 = 612 more custom fields), making up to 63 periods in total.
Field Requirements
- Actual and Budget fields must use the number data type with a length of 16 and be expressed to two decimal places.
- Actual fields must be named ActualPeriodnnn or ActualPeriodDualnnn, where nnn is the number of the trading period (001 to 099). The actual period name must be exactly as defined here, without spaces or other separation characters. For example: ActualPeriod001.
- All other fields must use the formula data type, the formula return type of "Number", and be expressed to two decimal places.
See the predefined fields in the Budget and Balance custom object for example formulas for each type of field.
Cumulative Balances
When you create additional Budget and Balance object fields to reflect the extra periods in your financial year, you will need to modify four of the existing fields to include the values from those extra periods. You cannot edit these directly because packaged fields cannot be altered, so you will need to create new fields to replace them.
The cumulative fields you need to replace are:
- Actual YTD Period 100
- Actual YTD Period Dual 100
- Budget YTD Period 100
- Budget YTD Period Dual 100
For example, the formula for ‘Actual YTD Period 100’ is:
c2g__ActualYTDPeriod012__c + c2g__ActualPeriod100__c
So if you are using 52 periods you will need a new ‘Actual YTD Period 100’ field with the formula defined as:
ActualYTDPeriod052__c + c2g__ActualPeriod100__c
You must also modify the page layouts to remove the four existing fields and replace them with the new custom fields.
Reporting Balances
There is a further set of fields on the Budgets and Balances object called TLI Count Period xxx. These are used when the actual balance is zero, to indicate whether any transactions exist (for example if the balance is made up of two or more transactions of equal and opposite value).
You will need to create one of these fields for each of the extra periods in your financial calendar. The field is defined as a checkbox.
After creating the new fields, remember to add them to the page layout.