Understanding PeopleSoft Commitment Control in PeopleSoft Expenses

PeopleSoft Commitment Control provides a mechanism for organizations to track or control expenditures and revenues against budget ledgers. The primary process that carries out transaction validations against budgets is the Budget Processor. You define the rules that govern spending in the commitment control budget definitions. These rules may affect the behavior of budget checking activity in PeopleSoft Expenses.

You can use a number of commitment control budget ledgers with varying sets of spending rules. You can configure budgets for commitment control, which disallows any expenditure over the amount of the budget plus a tolerance. You can configure budgets for only tracking, which means that you have no control over the total amount spent and the system only records the activity. PeopleSoft Expense transactions that you budget check will be subject to all of the commitment control budget ledgers that are active for a business unit.

When approving travel authorizations and expense reports, click the Budget Options link to access the Commitment Control page, where you initiate the budget checking process. You can also run the budget check process in batch mode for expense reports and travel authorizations through the Request Budget Check page.

Encumbrance Accounting

Encumbrance accounting enables you to reserve funds for an anticipated expense. Organizations that preapprove travel expenses and want to reserve funds for authorized trips can budget check travel authorizations and expense reports. Budget checking records encumbrances, or the reservation of funds, in the commitment control budget and then reverses the encumbrances when actual expenses are recorded.

Budget checking journal expense reports will reflect changes made to posted accounting distributions in the commitment control budget.

PeopleSoft Expenses delivers additional options for budget checking activity of expense transactions. PeopleSoft Commitment Control options supported in PeopleSoft Expenses enable you to cancel or close unused travel authorizations and reverse the associated encumbrances.

Budget Checking Exceptions

Budget checking exceptions are transactions that fail budget checking validations. These exceptions may be errors or warnings. Errors prevent the system from recording the transaction; warnings allow the system to record the transaction but inform you of the exception conditions. You can view these exceptions to determine the cause of the failure through PeopleSoft Expenses or through the PeopleSoft Commitment Control menu.

Expense transactions may fail budget checking for a variety of reasons and they may fail against one or more budget ledgers. They may fail because:

  • The ChartFields in the accounting distributions are incorrect.

  • Insufficient funds are available to support the expense.

  • The budget is permanently or temporarily closed.

If an expense transaction fails budget checking, or if warning conditions exist for an expense transaction, the budget processor marks the transaction as an error or warning exception. You can view these exceptions and override some error exceptions (with proper authority) on the budget exception pages. You can access error messages and warnings through PeopleSoft Expenses or the PeopleSoft Commitment Control menu.

Some exception conditions may be eligible for override, which allows an authorized user to force the transaction to record in the ledger. You must handle some exception conditions using the PeopleSoft Expenses transaction pages. Check with your Commitment Control administrator to understand the control rules and authorizations associated with budget checking in PeopleSoft Expenses.