Feature Summary: Budget Plan Narrative

If you are a public sector organization or have a need for text to accompany your formal budget package, this feature is for you! Check out this new feature available for budget planning in Dynamics 365 Finance.

Table of Contents

Background

The Budget Plan Narrative feature is available as of the 10.0.18 (May 2021) Dynamics 365 Finance release. This functionality was discussed a few years ago at the Dynamic Communities Summit public sector user group and nearly all public sector organizations indicated they have requirements for this functionality. The narrative feature enables you to include descriptions such as a description of the budget plan, performance measures, assumptions, or proposed changes to support specific budget lines. 

Enable the Feature

Complete the following steps to turn on the budget plan narrative feature. 

  • Navigate to the Feature Management workspace.
  • Search for "Budget plan narrative".
  • Enable the Budget plan narrative feature under feature management.
  • (Optional). You can also enable the New HTML editor control in the Feature management workspace to use a more feature-rich editor.
Feature Management view of Budget Plan Narrative Feature

Author the narrative

  1. In the Budget planning module, select a budget plan.
  2. Select Header to expand the Header View and enable access to the Budget plan narrative. The narrative will not be visible from the default Line View.
  3. Expand the Budget plan narrative section and add descriptions or revenue information that should be included in the budget plan.
Budget Plan Narrative from Header view

Report on the narrative

The feature summary points to reporting being available, but none is available at the time of the post. It looks like the formal reporting may be available in a future release, although nothing is public on the roadmap at this time. 

In my previous post here, I showed how you can extend the budget plan justification entity to add the two narrative fields. In my testing I found the data comes across, but not surprisingly it contains the HTML tags that power the rich text editor. 

Word document showing justification document with narrative field

Call to Action

This is a great feature to add value to your budgeting process. Reporting isn't formally available yet but, but this extension discussed could bridge that cap until formal release.

Budget Planning is a great module that many customers would benefit from looking at. I encourage you to take a look at for your organization. 

if you have Premier Support, we have several team members that can assist with proactive and reactive offerings. Reach out today to your Customer Success Account Manager for a Dynamics 365 Finance development workshop and we’ll have one of our experts work with you to get you the help you need. Otherwise, feel free to connect and reach out via LinkedIn.