Work the charter and budget screens

Two tabs on a program: Charter, which works, and Budget, which works for two of the four numbers it prints. This page goes control by control.

Who can do this

• Site director
• Organisation admin
• Super admin

management; admin for Review

Both tabs are inside a program's own layout, which loads the program's detail before drawing anything. That check excludes regional directors, so the role sees a failure message on both tabs. Staff members are excluded by the module's own setting.

The Charter tab

For the full walkthrough of creating and approving one, use the tutorial: Approve your first program charter. This section is the control reference.

Control	What it does	Notes
New Charter	Creates a charter as a draft, version 1	Title and Mission Statement are required. Vision and Scope are optional and cannot be added later
Submit for Approval	Moves a draft to pending	Only shows on a draft. PTRS would also accept a resubmit of a rejected charter; the button does not appear on one
Review	Opens the approve or reject controls	Organisation administrators and super admins only
Approve	Moves pending to approved, records who and when	Writes an approval-history row
Reject	Moves pending to rejected, writes history, records neither who nor when	Terminal in the interface. A rejected charter cannot be edited or resubmitted
Review comments	Optional free text saved on the history row	Shown on the card afterwards

The four counters

Total Charters, Approved, Pending and Drafts are all counted on your screen from the charter list, and all four are correct.

What is fixed on this screen

Charter limitations

• No edit. Correcting a charter is reachable from no screen. Title, mission, vision and scope are fixed once written.
• No delete. There is no delete action for a charter.
• "Version 1", always. Nothing anywhere assigns a charter a different version number. Every charter is version 1 and the list is ordered by that column.
• No effective or expiry date. Both live only on the action that corrects a charter, which nothing calls.
• No expired or superseded stage. Neither has a writer.
• Goals are never sent. The create form has no field for them.

Two stage labels on this screen do not correspond to reality

The screen's own stage colours include an archived label that is not one of PTRS's real charter stages, and leave out two that are, expired and superseded. Since none of the three can ever actually be set, the map behaves correctly by accident.

Times on the card and in the approval history are shown as raw, unformatted text, because nothing formats them for reading.

The Budget tab

Creating a budget

1. Click New Budget.
2. Fiscal Year, free text. The placeholder suggests a year range; nothing checks the shape, so whatever you type is what is stored and sorted on.
3. Total Budget ($), dollars.
4. Notes, optional.
5. Click Create.

The budget appears with a grey Draft badge and a usage bar.

A budget is created Draft and can never be approved

The badge would read Approved once the right flag is set, and the one action that would set it is reachable from no screen, so no budget in PTRS has ever been approved and the green badge is unreachable.

There is also no edit and no delete for a budget. The fiscal year, total and notes are fixed once written.

Recording an expense

1. Click Record Expense. It is disabled until at least one budget exists.
2. Description, required.
3. Amount ($), dollars. Nothing checks it; it may be zero or negative.
4. Category, see the warning below. Leave it blank unless you know the exact wording.
5. Vendor and Date, optional. If the date is left empty the screen sends today.
6. Click Record.

The expense appears under Recent Expenses when you expand the budget, and the Spent figure and the usage bar both go up.

Check which budget you are posting to before you record an expense

The dialog does not say which budget the expense will be posted to. The screen posts to the budget you have expanded, and if none is expanded it posts to the first budget in the list, the one with the highest fiscal year text, not necessarily the current one.

Expand the budget you mean first, then click Record Expense.

The Category box is free text over a fixed list

PTRS accepts twelve category names: Personnel, Supplies, Equipment, Facilities, Transportation, Food, Marketing, Training, Technology, Insurance, Administrative, Other.

The box is plain text whose placeholder suggests one example. PTRS matches without regard to case, so lower or upper case both work. Anything that is not one of the twelve names is refused, naming the value.

In particular, the labels shown in the Line Items table are not valid inputs. That table renders combined phrases like "Supplies and Materials" or "Staff Salaries"; typing either of those into the box is refused.

Leaving the box empty is safe; the screen substitutes Other.

The four summary cards

Card	Real?	Why
Total Budget	Yes	The saved total for one budget, see below
Allocated	No, permanently $0.00	Written only by the line-items action, which is reachable from no screen
Spent	Yes	The running total of expenses recorded through this screen
Remaining	Yes	Total minus Spent, worked out on your screen. Ignores Allocated

The four cards describe one budget, and do not say which

They read the first approved budget in the list, and since no budget can ever be approved, that always resolves to the first budget in the list, the highest fiscal year text.

With one budget the cards are correct. With several they describe one of them, and nothing on the screen names which. The per-budget rows below are the reliable figures.

The Line Items table

Line items cannot be created

Expand a budget and you may see a Line Items table with budgeted, spent and remaining columns. It only renders when the budget has line items, and nothing in PTRS can create one.

So the table never appears, and the Allocated card is $0.00 for every budget.

Two of that table's category labels, "Staff Salaries" and "Food and Beverages", are not real categories at all, while six that are, Personnel, Equipment, Food, Marketing, Insurance, Administrative, have no label and would show as their raw name. Personnel and Food are the two largest lines in a typical club program budget.

What "Spent" means here

It means entered. An expense's status starts Pending and nothing in PTRS ever changes it; approved, rejected, paid and voided are all unreachable. The running total goes up the moment someone types an amount, and there is no approval step between the two.

The screen does not display the status, so nothing on it contradicts this, but nothing on it says so either.

What is fixed on this screen

Budget limitations

• No budget edit, approve or delete.
• No line items, so no allocation and no category breakdown.
• No expense edit, delete, approve or void. An expense is fixed once written and permanently Pending.
• Overspend is not flagged on the summary card. A negative Remaining is shown in red in the line-items table, which never renders, and printed plain on the summary card. The usage bar does turn red above 90 percent.

Related

• Approve your first program charter
• What Programs can and cannot account for
• Who can do what with money and governance
• Programs troubleshooting