## Understanding Position Budget Management

This chapter provides an overview of position budget management.

### Position Budget Management

A position is an employee assignment for a fiscal year. You use positions to budget for employee salaries. Positions and their budgets are also called position budgets.

Position control is the process of creating, maintaining, and monitoring position budgets. You do not need to create positions to use Human Resources and Payroll. However, to use positions, you must have a position budget.

You define a position budget to establish, monitor, and control budgets for employee position assignments. To enable the accounting department to track the salary amounts that are budgeted for positions, you must define position accounts. You define position accounts either in Human Resources or General Accounting, depending on which department within the organization is responsible for determining salary amounts for position budgets.

You can attach employee records to a position budget and then review position budget information to ensure that the salary, hours, and full time equivalent (FTE) for the employees compare favorably to those that you budgeted for the position.

If a company desires, they can also associate a job with a position.

You can revise position budget information when a position budget changes or when you need to correct a data entry error.

To illustrate the reporting relationships among the positions in the organization, you can create parent/child relationships by position. Documenting parent/child relationships can help you determine whether you need to create additional positions or reduce the number of positions in the organization.

Human Resources provides comprehensive tools for position budget management so that you can improve the management of employee salary costs. The system enables you to:

- Review the approved headcount for a position before you create a requisition.

- Track position effective dates and the resulting budget calculations.

- Automatically update position activity when you change an employee record.

- Compare projected salaries through year end with the approved budget for each position.

- Determine year end costs by developing projections based on hours, salary amounts, headcount, or full time equivalents.

- Track positions and headcount by company and department.

- Post position budgets and accounts to the general ledger.