Siebel Marketing User Guide > Planning and Budgeting for Marketing > Process of Creating Marketing Plans and Budget Requests >

Developing and Managing Marketing Funds

Many marketing organizations, especially those that operate in multiple business lines and geographies, typically use disparate methods to track the sources, uses, and status of marketing funds. These methods might include the use of multiple, disconnected applications and media including spreadsheets, email messages, and departmental databases. Gaining control of these funds and maintaining a consistent view of the available fund balance is a challenge that is complicated by the lack of consistent processes across the organization.

By creating Marketing Funds, you can delegate spending authority to a particular department or cost center, and use Siebel Marketing to manage each budget. Because there is often a delay between the execution phase of a program and the date when all the invoices are received and processed in your back-office financial applications, your Marketing Funds and related tactics can provide a more up-to-date forecast with your organization's financial position.

Using Marketing Funds, an organization can:

• Establish a budget for each marketing department or cost center
• Draw money from these funds to pay for marketing tactics
• Transfer funds from one budget to another
• Adjust a fund with an increase or decrease (but not a transfer)
• Monitor current amounts for initial, allocated, committed, and spent funds

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

Creating Marketing Funds

Complete the steps in the following procedure to create a marketing fund.

To create a Marketing Fund

1. Navigate to the Marketing Plans screen and click Marketing Funds in the link bar.
2. In the Marketing Finds list, create a new marketing fund, and complete the required fields.

   The following table describes some of the fields.

   Field	Description
   Initial Amount	Indicates the amount delegated to the fund at the beginning of the planning cycle (typically an annual or quarterly cycle).
   Allocated	Indicates the total Approved Budget amount from budget requests associated with the Fund.
   Spent	Indicates the total of actual expenses from the tactics associated with the fund (using budget requests). If you have linked invoice line items to your tactic expenses, then this would represent the actual invoice amount. Otherwise, the actuals would be whatever was manually entered by users in the tactic-level expense records. NOTE:  You must associate the Budget Request with the expense.
   Fund Id	Automatically assigned when the record is created.
   Approval Status	Indicates the status of the marketing funds approval. Options are Submitted, Approved, Declined, Needs Revision. If you change the status to anything other than Approved or Declined, then you must specify the name of the employee who will become the new owner.
   Committed	Indicates the total of all purchase orders associated with budget requests from this fund. Note that the budget request and purchase order must both be associated with the same tactic.
   Available	Indicates the Initial Amount minus Committed minus Net Adjustments minus Net Transfers.
   Locked	When this check box is selected, the marketing fund can only be updated by a Marketing administrator.
   Net Adjustments	Net amount (calculated) of all financial adjustments made to the Marketing Fund.
   Net Transfers	Total transfers into the fund minus total transfers out of the fund.