Budgets

Definition

The monetary budgets assigned to a specific iati-activity can be described in the IATI activity standard using the following:

  • transaction-type type Commitment (code 2) can be used to describe the total committed budget for the duration of the activity. Any changes to the original commitment should be reported as additional, incremental transactions (positive or negative) so that the sum of commitments represents the total committed budget.
  • budget - the value of the iati-activity budget for each financial year over the lifetime of the activity, as stated in the original project document or revised accordingly. While it is useful for the sum of budgets to match the sum of commitments this is not necessarily the case, depending on a publisher’s business model and legal frameworks.
  • planned-disbursement - a scheduled payment, set up against the budget

Additionally, there are two areas within the IATI activity standard that allow further clarification of budgets:

  • country-budget-item - alignment of iati-activity with the functional and administrative classifications used in the recipient-country Chart of Accounts.
  • capital-spend - the percentage of the total commitment that is for capital spending.

These all relate to the specific iati-activity being described.

Considerations

When using the IATI activity standard to declare budgets, the following should be considered:

  • It is recommended that budgets are presented in financial years.
  • A budget must not span a period greater than one year.
  • When presenting multiple budgets, then the budget element should be repeated accordingly.
  • It is expected that the financial years for reporting-org are described.
  • It is possible to report periods other than years, but this is not recommended.
  • Financial periods can be presented using the period-start and period-end dates.
  • For planned-disbursement it is valid to only report the period-start as a single date.
  • It is possible to report budget values in multiple currencies, overriding the default currency set in iati-activity
  • It is expected that budgets would be described from the reporting-org perspective.
  • When declaring a value-date for any budget, this date must be in the past.

2.01+ Considerations

In versions 2.01 and above, the following must also be considered:

  • The planned-disbursement element no longer has an @updated attribute. This has been replaced by a @type attribute