Planning tracks budgets by planning units—a slice of data at the intersection of a scenario, a version, and an entity or part of an entity. It is the basic unit for preparing, annotating, reviewing, and approving plan data.
Planning units are in one of the following states:
Not Started: Initial state of all planning units. An administrator begins the review process by starting a planning unit using the Start action, which changes a planning unit's state to First Pass.
First Pass: Beginning state of planning units selected for the budgeting process. Planning units have no owners during First Pass. Users having access can enter data and promote planning units during the First Pass state. During this state, administrators may exclude some or all members from planning units.
When a planning unit is ready for review, users select one of several actions, changing planning unit status and passing ownership. To be notified by e-mail if you become the owner of a planning unit, see Setting Up E-mail.
Under Review: Occurs after a Promote or Submit action, and signifies that someone is reviewing the planning unit. Only the current owner or administrators can modify data on planning units whose state is Under Review. While Under Review, planning units may undergo iterations of promotions, submissions, signoffs, and rejections until they are finally approved.
Frozen: All related data in descendant planning units is locked (read only). The owner who froze the planning units, or an owner above that user, selects Unfreeze to reverse this action.
Distributed: Multiple users are reviewing the budget. The reviewers are filtered by permissions and specified reviewers for the distribute action selected (Distribute, Distribute Children, or Distribute Owner, see Changing Planning Unit Status).
Signed Off: Occurs when Sign Off is selected. Only the current owner or administrator can modify data or perform an action on planning units whose state is Signed Off. Ownership does not change when a planning unit is signed off.
Not Signed Off: Occurs when Reject is selected. Only the current owner or administrator can modify data or perform an action on a planning unit whose state is Not Signed Off.
Approved: Occurs when Approve is selected. The administrator becomes the owner. Only the administrator can modify data or perform an action on approved planning units. After all planning units are approved, the budgeting cycle is complete.
Notes:
In all states except the Not Started state, users with read access can view data, view the approval state, view the history, and read and enter annotations.
A planning unit may skip approval states. For example, an administrator may approve a started planning unit from any state.
The review process can be managed at a higher level with parent planning units.
Note: | The actions available when changing planning unit status depend on which Approvals template is selected. For example, when using the Distribute template, users can select Submit to pass ownership to the next user in the promotional path. When using the Bottom Up template, however, Submit is not available. Instead, users select Promote to pass ownership to the next user in the promotional path. |