The case budget is a crucial piece of information that allows you to determine how much work you can perform on a given case. Often times, clients will grant a limited budget to preliminarily work a case, and then grant additional budget if the investigator determines that it is worth their time and money to perform additional services. Trackops allows you to track your initial budget and your additional budget adjustments through a simple interface.
Setting an Initial Budget
When the case is first created, the person submitting the case has the ability to add an initial budget through the new case creation process. If the budget is omitted or left out, it can easily be added via the case at any time.
Adding Additional Budget
To adjust the case budget, navigate to the case in question and look for the financial block on the right side of the screen. You can also add additional budget via the New button, as shown below.
Note: An employee must have the permission to Modify budget on cases in order to perform this action.
From here, click Add Budget, and fill in the details of the budget adjustment:
- Date: The date that the budget was authorized or received.
- Added By: The person associated with this budget addition. In most situations, this will be the person who is adding the adjustment, however for reporting purposes it may be necessary to indicate a specific individual.
- Additional Budget: Add the additional budget that was authorized in money or hours. Remember, the system will add this adjustment to the existing budget on the case, so you only need to add the newly received amount, not the entire new budget total.
- Note: If you wish to reduce the budget, you can do so by entering a negative number in the additional budget field (e.g. -100).
- Notes / Justification: If there is a specific use case or other important factor surrounding this budget adjustment, enter it here.
Once the budget adjustment has been added, the case will be updated to reflect the new budget total. If at any time you wish to view a log of budget adjustments, click the View History link in the financial block and you will be able to see an entire list of budget adjustments on the case in question.
For more information and insights, please read our managing profitability on your cases article, which covers budget auditing across the board.