Training: Budgets & Settings

This guide covers the yearly training budget, how spend is measured against it, and the module's per-company settings.

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Purpose

This answers the finance question behind every approval: "Have we got the money for this?" — and the year-end one: "Where did the training budget actually go?"

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Budgets

A budget is an amount for one year, belonging to one company, and either to a single department or to the company as a whole.

Only one budget can exist per company, department, and year. A second one for the same scope is refused, so utilisation figures can never be inflated by duplicate rows.

Budgets are managed under Settings → Training → Training Budgets. The page shows, for the chosen year, each budget with its spend and what remains.

The form follows the company switcher:

• Inside a company, the company is already known, so the form asks for the department — left empty for a company-wide budget.
• From "All companies", there's no company to inherit, so the form asks which company the budget belongs to, and the budget it creates is company-wide.

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How Spend Is Measured

Spend for a year is the sum of two things:

1. Approved requests that haven't been scheduled yet — their estimated cost. This is money committed but not yet organised. The year is the year the request was decided.
2. Session cost, divided across the session's attendees — counted once per attendee. The year is the year the session starts. Cancelled sessions are excluded.

Two consequences worth understanding:

• A request stops counting once it becomes a session. From then on the session's real cost supersedes the estimate — otherwise every delivered request would be counted twice.
• A session's cost splits across departments by attendee. One session drawing four people from three departments charges each department for its own share, which is what makes a departmental budget meaningful.

The training dashboard shows the same figures for the current year — budget, spent, and remaining — to anyone holding the budget-view permission.

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Training Settings

Settings → Training → Training Settings holds two per-company settings:

Setting	What it does
Default evaluation template	Applied to a session on completion when no template was chosen on the session itself.
Evaluation window (days)	How long attendees have to submit an evaluation, counted from the day the session is completed. Defaults to 14.

Settings are one row per company. Viewed from "All companies", the page settles on the company of whoever is signed in.

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Where Each Setting Lives

Screen	Location
Training Categories	Settings → Training
Evaluation Templates	Settings → Training, and Training → Evaluation Templates
Training Budgets	Settings → Training
Training Settings	Settings → Training
Programs, Trainers, Sessions, Requests	Training menu

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What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	Reporting Manager	HR Administrator
See this year's budget and spend on the training dashboard	—	—	✅
See the budget-versus-spend chart on the dashboard	—	—	✅
Open the budget page	—	—	✅
Create, edit, or delete a budget	—	—	✅
Open and change training settings	—	—	✅

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How Visibility Is Decided

1. Permissions. The budget pages and the settings page each need their own view permission, with separate permissions for changing them.
2. The dashboard follows the same rule. Its budget card and its budget-versus-spend chart need the budget-view permission, exactly as the budget page does. A reporting manager who can open the dashboard for their team's pending requests sees it without either.
3. Company. A budget belongs to a company. With a company selected, the pages show that company's rows; from "All companies", every company's rows are shown and totalled together.

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Good to Know

• Spend is calculated, not entered. There's no ledger to post to — the figures come from the requests and sessions already in the system.
• A budget is not a control. Nothing is blocked when spend passes the budget; the figures report the position, and the decision stays with the approver.
• Departmental budgets need a company first. A department only means something inside one, which is why the form offers one or the other, never both.
• The year comes from the record, not from today. A request counts in the year it was decided; a session counts in the year it starts.

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