Training
The best way to learn how to use Planning is for someone in your school to teach you, one on one. Each school or center has different expectations about who needs to be involved in each phase of the planning process, and what you should be taking into account and saying or doing, and one on one training can cover that.
The planning access form needs to be signed by the person who is training you. Once your userid has been created, you will need to do the Setup for New Users.
In general, you will do your data entry using the data entry forms in PennPlnx, Data entry needs to be done at the lowest level, so you need to pick one org, fund, object, program, cref, employee, year, version and scenario. Most schools and centers do their data entry to the time period called yeartotal, and let it spread evenly over the months. A few do data entry at the month level. If you need to review an existing budget, you can navigate to the org, fund, object, program and cref that you want and use the tweak form to see all the object codes that are budgeted there. If you need to budget or forecast something new, go to the form for that category, like Tuition or Current Expense, and all available object codes will appear. But be careful: most existing should already be budgeted somewhere, so be careful not to duplicate the same activity in another COA combination.
While data entry is at the lowest level possible, canned reports are typically run at the highest level possible, meaning all your orgs, funds, programs and crefs added together. We encourage you to compare your budget and forecast for last year to the actuals, using the Closing Summary Report – Prior Year. Look at how you’re doing in the current fiscal year with the YTD Analysis, and see where the computer thinks you might end up if this year is exactly like last year in the Calculated Forecast.
If the canned reports tell you everything you need to know, you’re almost done. Just decide what you think about it and type it in to revise your forecast or budget as needed. But if you need to know more, you can run other canned reports, or drill down on this information in SmartView, or use the data warehouse.
There are videos that show you how to do some of the common tasks in Planning here.