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Developing and Tracking Budgets for Marketing Plans

You can use marketing plans to develop budgets. As you implement tactics, you can track the financial status of the marketing plan.

You can optionally use the Marketing Plan to track all the budget requests you have submitted to pay for the tactics in your plan. You do not have to use the Marketing Plan to submit budget requests for your tactics, but you might find it convenient to associate the budget requests here for easier tracking.

This task is a step in Process of Creating Marketing Plans and Budget Requests.

The following procedure shows how to allocate funds from a budget request to tactics.

To allocate funds from a budget request to tactics

1. Navigate to the Marketing Plans screen.
2. In the Marketing Plans list, click a marketing plan.
3. Click the Budget Requests view tab, and verify that you have associated your budget requests and their related programs, events, and stand-alone campaigns.

   For more information on associating plan tactics, see Creating and Associating Tactics with Marketing Plans.

4. In the bottom list of tactics for each budget request, if the Allocated Amount is not visible, then use the Columns Displayed option to add it:
   1. From the Tactics Menu, choose Columns Displayed.
   2. In the Columns Displayed dialog box, move Allocated Amount to the Selected Columns list and click Save.
5. In the Allocated Amount field for the Tactic, enter the portion of the budget request Approved Budget that you want to allocate to that tactic. If there is only one tactic for that budget request, then this amount must be 100%.

   If you developed forecast expenses for the tactic, then you can verify the plan is within budget by comparing your assigned budget to the forecast expenses.

NOTE:  You can also perform Step 4 and Step 5 directly on the Budget Requests screen.