Budgets
Info
This feature is only available for Enterprise Edition customers.
Budgets allow to keep track of and limit the execution costs of processes when they run workers with costs.
A budget can be associated to one or more projects, and a project can only be linked to one budget.
A budget has access rights distinct from those of projects, allowing for more precise management of user rights, for example by allowing a user to contribute to a project without being able to run workers with costs, or to manage a budget without having access to the documents in the associated projects.
Budget entries¶
Within a budget, budget entries represent changes in the funds available on the budget, with a description and optionally an associated user or process.
Typically, instance administrators will add budget entries for their user account with positive values through the administration interface to add funds to the budget, and budget entries will be automatically created with negative values when executing a process.
Budget entries can have values ranging from -999,999,999.999 to 999,999,999.999. All monetary values are represented in euros (€).
Using euros, rather than a virtual currency or point system, helps users better grasp how much their processes cost in real money. This is however purely informative. Arkindex does not directly handle any financial information, and does not have an invoice or payment system.
Browsing budgets¶
In the top-right user menu, the Budgets action shows a list of all budgets that the user has access to. Clicking on any of those budgets will show their details page, including the currently available funds computed from all budget entries, the full list of budget entries, and the budget’s memberships.
It is also possible to view the budget associated to a project from the project information page, under the Details tab.
From the status view of a process, the Budget entries action of the Actions menu offers a list of all the budget entries associated with this specific process, along with the total execution cost for this process.
Administration¶
Other than viewing them and managing their memberships, most operations on budgets are only possible through the administration interface. This includes:
- creating a new budget;
- editing an existing budget;
- deleting a budget;
- assigning a budget to a project;
- creating budget entries.
Creating budget entries for processes¶
The arkindex update_budgets administrator creates new budget entries for all processes that use workers with costs and have had any activity since the last time they had any budget entry created for them. System administrators need to arrange for this command to be run regularly to create new budget entries automatically.
Restricting process execution¶
Instance administrators can enable the process_enforce_budgets setting to require funds to be available to run processes that use workers with costs. When attempting to start a process, retry a process, or restart a task, an error will occur when:
- there is no budget on the project associated with the process;
- there is a budget, but you do not have the access rights to consume funds from this budget;
- there is a budget, but it does not have any funds available.
This option will apply for the whole instance, on any budget, project or worker.