Plan Campaigns - How do I set up a fund and give budget to my locations?

Introduction

Fund management lets you set up and maintain marketing budgets directly in Plan Campaigns. You define a fund, decide which cost element it pays out against, and distribute money to your locations by uploading a file. From that point on, the fund lives in the product: locations see their balance when they plan campaigns, approved claims are deducted automatically, and you can top up or correct allocations at any time.

Fund management is available under Planner settings and is visible only to users with the Fund management administrator privilege. This guide covers how to create a fund and keep it up to date. How funds are used inside campaigns is covered in a separate guide.

How it works

Creating a fund

Open the Fund management tab in Planner settings and create a new fund. Each fund has:

• Fund type, either Time-limited or Rolling. Time-limited funds run for a defined period and expire at the end date, after which no new money can be added. Rolling funds carry any unused balance forward indefinitely. The type cannot be changed after the fund is created, so choose it carefully.
• Name, used everywhere the fund appears.
• Currency, selected from the currencies configured in General settings.
• Fund period, required for time-limited funds.

The currency you set on the fund takes priority over the currency selector in individual campaign items. In items that use a fund, the selector becomes inactive. If you change the currency later, the currency code updates across all items and reports, but no values are recalculated.

Choosing the cost element

Every fund is linked to a cost element. This is the field in your campaign template that holds the amount to be paid out, for example a Reimbursement amount. It must be a shared Number or Money element, or a calculation result.

The value in this element is what gets deducted from the fund when a claim is approved. Nothing else affects the balance, so it is worth checking that the element you pick is the one your approvers actually work with.

New fund creation

Distributing money to locations

Money reaches your locations through an Excel upload. When you import a file, you map three columns:

• Location identifier, the column holding the location ID, for example Dealer ID. It is matched against the unit title in Unit Manager.
• Injection value, the column holding the amount, for example Period 1.
• Additional information, optional, for comments or reference data.

You do not need to prepare the file to match fixed column names. You choose the columns at the moment of import, so you can work with the file your finance team already produces.

A few rules to be aware of:

• Rows referencing a location ID that does not exist in Unit Manager will fail. Those rows are listed in an error log, and the rest of the import goes through.
• Duplicate location IDs in the same file block the whole import.
• If the location or value column is missing, the import is blocked.

Fund file mapping

Topping up and correcting

A fund can be topped up as many times as you need during its active period. Each import adds to the running total rather than replacing it, and each import is recorded in the fund's history with a timestamp, its status, the column mapping used and who ran it.

To reduce an allocation, upload a negative value. To adjust a single location, edit that location's amount directly in the Fund management tab, without touching the master file.

Any change you make takes effect immediately. Balances shown to users in their campaigns update in real time, with no need to reload anything.

Keeping an eye on usage

Each fund has a report tab showing how the budget is being used across your organisation. That is covered in the Fund reports guide.

Upload overview in Fund detail