How to Manage Team Budgets in Alyce
Team Administrators have the ability to manage gift spending by allocating specific budgets to teams and team members.
Start by opening the "Users and Teams" Settings by clicking on the gear, Users & Teams, and opening the Teams tab. The budget details will be displayed on the right.
Defining a Budget
By hovering next to the team name you'd like to edit, you can bring up the "Actions" drop down and click on "Budget" to pull up the budget sidebar.
Within the sidebar you will be able to define each team member’s gifting budget and the reset period for the team - either weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually or no reset period.
Once you have applied a budget amount and reset period - save. Then that budget will be applied to all Prospecting and Personal campaigns that the team is associated with.
Budget Type:
- User gift budgets — each team member has individual budget, spending of one team member doesn’t influence the budget of another team member
- Team gift budget (coming soon!) — all team members have a shared budget
Reset Period: Defines how often the budget refreshes. With this team setting the budget can be reset:
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Quarterly
- Annually
- No reset option
Gift Budget
The gift budget is the amount of money available for the entire team over the selected time period. The amount is the sum of all team member budgets. The field is read only when the selected Budget type is Users gift budget.
Pause gifting when:
- Total cost of claimed gifts meets gift budget — When the total cost of claimed gifts meets the gift budget, gift-senders are not able to send more gifts until the next reset period.
Budget can go negative because recipients are able to claim pending gifts.
- Total cost of sent gifts meets gift budget — When the total cost of sent gifts meets the gift budget, gift-senders are not able to send more gifts until the next reset period.
Budget can’t go negative because team members can’t send more gifts than they budgeted.
Information related to the budget is easily viewed in the header - by hovering over the ‘Available Budget’ section, a drop-down menu will be revealed that will give further details about the available budget, pending gift costs, and the total value of the budget. When a gift is claimed, its value is also shown in the ‘Utilized This Period’ section of the team budget settings (previous screenshot) and is deducted from the ‘Available Budget’ within the drop-down.
How Team Budgets are Applied to Campaigns
After you have defined a team budget, those limits will apply to all prospecting and personal campaigns the team or users are associated with. For instance, if you have a team member with a $1000 budget that is on three different campaigns, that $1000 can be used on any of their personal or prospecting campaigns and will ensure that the user doesn’t exceed their budget.
Note: budgetary limits are not applied to 1:Many campaigns or Gift Code Redemption.
We’ve introduced a way to select individual members within the campaign creation flow to give more granular control over how budgets are applied.
Any campaign that exceeds the user’s budget will be disabled from sending more gifts, providing information to the user about the issue.
Other Workflows Budgets Will Impact
Several other considerations were made to ensure that budget limits and permissions are applied. For instance, if a campaign has been assigned to a team that has not configured a budget, that campaign will not be enabled in the gifting flow providing information to the user.
In addition, if a user started the gifting flow for a recipient but hasn’t selected a gift yet, we ensure only users with access to that campaign can continue the gifting flow for that recipient.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What if my team is over budget but still needs to send more gifts this period?
- The budget allocations and reset period can be changed at any time and the team admin simply needs to view the team in settings and click on the budget assigned column to access and change this information.
- When a pending gift is unclaimed during a reset period what happens to the value of the gift when it is claimed?
- The pending value will still be visible in the header toolbar and will persist until either the gift is claimed or expired. If the gift is claimed, the value of the gift will be considered utilized in the new period.