Independent Budgeting for Sub-Projects in the Project Hierarchy in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3

Here is small enhancement to the project budgeting feature in AX 2012 R3 release, which most of us are probably aware by now. I still wanted to publish it here for awareness in case you have not explored this yet.

Till the AX 2012 CU7 release, it was not possible to have an original budget to be tracked for sub-projects which is created after the original budget for a parent project is committed. The only way to enable budgeting for the newly added sub-project, was to create a revision for the original budget of the parent project which was committed earlier which allowed to track the budget as a revised budget on the new sub-project.

In the R3 release of Dynamics AX 2012, it is now possible to create and manage budgets for sub-projects independently.

Let us try to understand how this functionality works in AX 2012 R3. For this demonstration, let us create a Parent project and create two sub-projects under it and call them as Phase I and Phase II.

• Create the parent project and create two sub-projects under it and enable the  “Independent budgeting for sub-projects” check box on the parent project.

• Select the parent project, click Plan Tab > Budget > Project Budget action button.
• Under the Costs fast tab, create a new budget line and open the dropdown for the project field. Notice that, system shows only the Parent project as a selectable option and you will not see the project hierarchy tree on the left hand side of the project budget screen.

• This allows to create and manage Original budgets for each project in the hierarchy. So, whenever new projects are added to the hierarchy in the future, original budgets can be created for those without the need of revising the original budget for the whole hierarchy.
• This new functionality will also let you allocate the budgets across periods as you want for each sub-projects in the project hierarchy. Before this functionality, you will always need to allocate the budgets of a new sub-project using the same period which you would have done for the original budget.

• You can still view the project budget balances and system still rolls up the values in the hierarchy and shows the remaining budget balances and you can also view the breakdown by each category.