How to Set Up Budgets in MyOrderDesk Follow
In MyOrderDesk, Budgets are a Payment Method. They work best when assigned to groups rather than individual users. The updating (ie: adding additional funds) and management of the budgets is done by you, and not your customer.
Setting up the Budget
- Go to: Shopping Cart > Payment Methods
- Add Payment Method > Custom
- Name the Budget
- Enable the Budget
- Unselect Require Bill To information during checkout because you are applying the order to a budget and don’t need billing information.
- If you don’t want the budget to start until a certain date you can enter that as well as easily stop the budget by entering an end date.
- Under Tracking, enable the Budget (deduct from Total) option.
- Enter an amount in Adjustment Amount for the budget that will be available to this User/Group. Every time someone applies their order toward this budget method, it will deduct from this amount. This is also the place the provider would come to if they wanted to add or subtract from the budget total.
- Enter a reason if you would like (ie: initial budget amount, additional funds for the new quarter, etc.).
- Save your new payment method.
View History
- After Saving your Budget, go back to the list of Payment Methods and select the Budget Method you created.
- Notice that you now see the total budget amount available, along with a new option of History at the bottom of this screen.
- Select History
- In this window, you can see who has been ordering toward the Budget, who has been managing the funds in the Budget, etc.
Activate the Budget in your Group
- Go to Users & Groups
- Select the Group you want to make the Budget available to
- Select Checkout Options
- Find the Budget Payment Method in the list, and turn it on.
Using the Budget when ordering
- When a user goes to checkout, they will be able to select this Budget and the amount ordered will be deducted from the total.
- If there are not enough funds available in the Budget, they will receive a message that they need to select an additional method for the remaining amount (assuming there is another method available). If there are no additional methods to apply the remaining cost to, the user will not be able to checkout until the cost in the cart is reduced or additional funds are added to the budget.
Reporting on Budget History
You can set up and run a report to see the orders that have been placed against the budgets you have set up in your site. Once this is done, you may also want to create a new group for the site admins (your customers) to run the report when it is convenient for them.
- To do this, go to: Reports > Create New Item.
- Name your report (ie: Budgets)
- Select the items you would like to see in your report. Some suggested fields are:
- Job Create Date
- Order Sender
- Order Sender Email
- Payment Amount
- Payment Date
- Payment Method
- Save the report
- At the top of the page, beside the name of the report, select View
- Complete the settings you would like and run the report
- You can now open the database file and filter on the budget payment method
To share this report with your customer you may want to create a new group so that you can be specific on which users can view this report. You can then go to Users & Groups and select the Group > Reports > select the report you created and turn it on. Your customer will run this report from the bottom of the history page by selecting the Reports option.
Additional Details:
- There is no requirement that the end-user must use the budget if they have another option available to them.
- They cannot indicate how much they want to apply to the budget and how much they want to apply to another method. The only time the funds can be split between more than one method is when the budget does not have the available funds needed to cover the order.
- Budgets at the user level. This is not recommended unless you have a small set of users that you are managing. The reason for this is, you must create a new payment method for each of the users and specifically connect that payment method to just that user. The feature works best when you have a group of users all ordering from the same budget.
- To assign a payment method to just one user, first create the budget, and then go to Groups > Groups I Created > Members > Double-click on the user > Group Settings > navigate to the bottom of the page to Checkout Options and select that one payment method that was created for that user's budget.
- At this time there is no way to enter the payment methods by database upload so in the situation where every user has their own budget, everyone must be manually entered and updated/adjusted when additional funds are needed.