Workflow Sample: Episode 501: You Don't Know the Spending of Budget?

"How much money did we spend on Entertainment expense, this period?"

Serving as a Sales Manager, one should precisely know "Current total amount of external expenses that have approved". If possible, a Manager should recognize "Spending that not needed to be approved" as well. (In plain words, to keep tracking on "pocket money book" of Sales Department diligently... Formally speaking, it is "Budget management".)

In the following Workflow, "Total expenditure until then" will be indicated on the side at the time Approval request coming around. Specifically, spendings recorded in "Budget consumption logs", which is a Google Sheet (commonly called Pocket Money book), will be summed automatically. Moreover, at the moment of approving newly on a spending, the approved expenditure will be appended automatically to "Budget consumption log".

If you want the Budget consumption log to be more accurate, you will be required operational devising such as,

to remove the approval log that has not been consumed actually
to append manually for irregular small expenses

or improvement of Business Process such as

to create a mechanism of automatic appending from "Advertising flow" which approval is not required
to create a mechanism of automatic appending the items of expenditure corresponding to the budget consumption from Expense reimbursement flow

However, it is a great progress that knowing just the approximation of the total amount.

Incidentally, you will be able to build "dedicated Cloud-approval" in half a day, using this sample. You may use that system at your own home, assigning the husband as the applicant and the wife as the approver.

[Approval Request flow]

* This is an arrangement of Episode 462: Planning - Approval (Starter Template)

<Reference: [Planning-Approval flow] in "Episode 462: Planning - Approval">

To operate this Business Process, you need to newly create a Google Spreadsheet in advance. You'd better name it like "Sales pocket money book 2017". The file ID of it (letters in red) will be needed for defining Business Process.

※ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1exampleEXAMPLEexampleEXAMPLEexampleEXAMPLE0/edit#gid=0

And, after some Issues flowing on this Business Process, sheets for each "budget category", such as "Entertainment expense" or "Welfare expense", have been generated. And amounts of external payment will be appended to F column of the sheets. (You may create sheets beforehand.)

[Config screen]

Meanwhile, at [Cumulative total reference] placed before the Step of [2. Approval], numeric values in e.g. "Entertainment expense sheet: column F ", are referenced. Every values that can be determined as number are summed, and recorded in "Total of External payment".

[Config screen]

By the way, as you see in the Business Process Diagram, there is a time lag between [Auto-record] and [Auto-reference]. Therefore, in the period when a lot of requests to be submitted, the "sum" will not be always accurate. Watch out for this.

[Approval Request flow:"1. Request for Approval" screen]