10. Budget Integration Scenarios

Revised: 09 November 2021

Overview

Coupa’s budgeting capabilities allow organizations to set budgets and ensure that spend fits within the agreed-to parameters over any period of time. The following articles show how to set up, administer, and report against your budgets.

Before you start, there are some features outside of just tracking spend that are built into the budgeting engine. With Coupa budgets you can do the following:

  • Budget on any number of segments within each COA.

  • Know that budgets only reflect the transactions that happen within Coupa (PO, Invoices, Expense Reports).

  • Set budget periods for any period of time you want.

  • Each COA can have its own budget periods.

  • Load budget lines through the UI, a CSV file, or the APIs.

  • Adjust budgets through the UI, a CSV file, or the APIs.

You can solve common business problems by performing the following tasks:

  • Budget against marketing spend: Since most of the marketing spend in a company is tied to non-payroll expenses, for example, contractors or services.

  • Budget for retail locations: Our retailers use Coupa to budget at the store level. This means that for each individual store, you can set a specific amount they can spend in a month, depending on their profitability, volume, staff size, or any parameter you choose.

  • Project budgeting: You can load project codes into the account structure, so you can drive budgets for those projects within Coupa.

  • Commodity-based budgeting: You can track spend against a particular commodity. A commodity which spans multiple cost centers can be centrally managed by one budget owner, and the person responsible for that commodity line has visibility into their spend.

Budget Lines

Budget lines can be configured and defined by period, amount, cost center, location, or any other accounting code. When a User creates a new requisition, a specific budget line can be assigned to each item requested.

Budget lines establish the Budget. Budget lines are composed of a period, the particular values in a budget segment, and an amount.

Budget lines can be created manually (through the UI) or through a bulk load. If you create multiple budget lines at one time, it is recommended to use the budget bulk load to get that information into the system.

Methods

See Using API and Using CSV for an overview of each method. 

  • For details on the Coupa standard CSV flat file integration for Budget, see:
    Buget Lines CSV In 
  • For details on the Coupa REST API integration for Budget, see:
    Budget Lines API

Scenarios