Budgeting in Mo
Budgeting is a feature to help create a controlled environment of budget spending whilst encouraging spend through visibility of what is available and when.
Found in the rewards section of Mo, you can control spending at an organisational level down to an individual group or person. There are three main parts to a budget on Mo: the budget groups, the spending pots and the rewards themselves.
The first thing you are going to want to do is navigate to the budget page. To do this, click Rewards in the sidebar and then Manage in the top right.
To create a budget, click the Create Budget button in the top right.
Creating your budget
The first section contains information about the budget. I'm going to create a budget called UK Retail Budget as an example:
Budget Name - I've named mine 'UK Retail Budget'
Currency - This is the currency of the budget, this is automatically set as the region in which you are in.
Annual Budget - This will be where you set the value of the budget, I've chosen £10,000
Budget Start Date - This is when the budget will first be available to use. Budgets run for a year so you'll be able to set your budget to run in line with your financial year.
Budget Collaborators
A budget collaborator is somebody who can create spending pots in their assigned budget and change budget approvers — they could be the head of the department or regional MD structuring reward spending for their section of the organisation.
You can choose individual people to be collaborators or entire groups.
Click here to read our article on spending pots.
Budget Approvers
A budget approver can issue or decline any rewards given from the budget that require approval (in addition to any users with the Rewards Admin role). Approval may be required due to the reward settings or because approving it will take you over budget.
In here, you can also choose individual people to be collaborators or entire groups.
Once you have completed all the steps above, hit the 'Create Budget' button at the bottom to save. You will now be able to see your budget on the page.
How we calculate your max yearly spend
Each budget you create will have a Calculated max yearly spend. This is the sum of the following for each pot:
Number of people in a pot
The amount each person can spend for each pot
How many cycles fit into 12 months
This sum is a helpful estimate that can be used in understanding the cost of your spending pots and provides a 'heads-up' if you were to go over your budget!
If you take our budget as an example:
We've capped our annual budget spend at £30,000 and we have 3 different spending pots within our budget:
Engineering: Consists of 5 people, the cycle length is 1 month and each person gets to spend £200. This all equals to £1,000 per cycle and £12,000 per year.
CS: Consists of 3 people, the cycle is 3 months and each person gets to spend £400. This all equals to £1,200 per cycle and £4,800 per year.
Sales: Consists of 10 people, the cycle length is 6 months and each person gets to spend £1,000. This all equals to £6,000 per cycle and £12,000 per year.
Our Calculated max yearly spend of this budget is £28,800 - this would put us in budget!
If however, we added more people to any of our spending pots, the Calculated max spend would most likely go over our cap of £30,000. This means that all issued rewards would be sent to the approval queue and sit pending (as there wouldn't be enough money in our budget). The reward admin(s) would then need to decide whether to increase the budget cap or to remove people from spending pots.
If you're still having trouble with creating budgets, please don't hesitate to get in touch. You can do so by clicking the icon in the bottom right 😄