Recorded spending compares finance’s monthly labor expense report with a named approved budget edition. Employee pay and expected employee cost are optional. You can start with one complete labor total per department.
Before you begin
You need View compensation and View labor budgets for the departments you compare. Import and publish recorded labor actuals allows uploading and publishing expenses. Downloads also require Export compensation and Export labor budgets. Maintaining employee pay uses a separate permission.
Your organization must require MFA before enabling an actuals source. MFA continues to apply while protected compensation data is available. A finance setup owner must confirm the required retention period. A hold prevents routine deletion.
Use an expense report assigned to calendar months in the organization’s reporting currency. A pay-date report must first be allocated to expense months by finance or its source system. Gross pay and loaded labor cost are different cost coverage choices. Loaded labor includes employer taxes, benefits, and other employer costs covered by your source report.
Set up the source
- Open Recorded spending in Employee cost.
- In Actions, choose Map department code. Link each stable source code to its department. The same codes must appear in your expense and budget files.
- Choose Retention policy. Confirm your organization’s required retention period and whether a hold applies.
- Choose Set authoritative source. Give the report source a name, responsible finance owner, first expense month, identifier namespace, and gross-pay or loaded-labor coverage. Source setup requires publication access to all departments.
- Use one source for each cost. A new source contract begins after previously published months. Earlier source contracts remain attached to their expenses.
Done when: finance has confirmed the reporting currency, expense-month basis, covered costs, department codes, and source owner.
Publish an approved monthly budget
Choose Publish approved budget in Actions. Name the approved edition, enter its approval reference, and upload monthly budget amounts. Include the whole position budget, including vacant capacity. A later budget revision gets its own edition name.
For one department with a complete loaded-labor budget:
expense_month,department_code,cost_category,amount,currency2027-01,D100,total_labor,10000.00,USDUse the same period, department codes, currency, and cost coverage as the expenses you will compare. A combined total cannot be uploaded alongside its components.
Import and review expenses
Choose Import actuals. Each upload covers one expense month and completely replaces that month’s amounts for every included department. Departments absent from the file remain as published.
The smallest complete expense file is:
source_row_id,expense_month,department_code,cost_category,amount,currency,employee_external_id,position_codeJAN-D100,2027-01,D100,total_labor,9600.00,USD,,Supply independent control totals from the source report in a second CSV:
expense_month,department_code,cost_category,amount,currency2027-01,D100,total_labor,9600.00,USDEnter the source report reference and date. Choose Validate and review, compare uploaded totals with the independent controls, and confirm the review before publishing. The previous published month remains visible until the complete replacement is accepted.
Amounts may include signed reversals. Monetary amounts use the reporting currency’s minor units: USD allows two decimal places and JPY allows whole yen. Commas inside amounts, formulas, unexpected columns, and mixed currencies are rejected. Keep bank details, deductions, and government identifiers out of these files.
Done when: each included department and supplied category matches its source control total, the source coverage is correct, and the reviewed package is published.
Supply category or employee detail
Gross pay can be supplied as gross_pay, or as all three categories regular_pay, overtime, and other_earnings. Loaded labor can be supplied as total_labor, or as gross pay plus employer_taxes, employer_benefits, and other_employer_costs. Include an explicit zero for a covered detailed category with no expense.
Employee and position identifiers are optional. Use Map source identifier to explicitly link an identifier to a record you can access. If a supplied identifier remains unresolved, you must deliberately choose Keep unresolved source identifiers without employee or position detail. Its money still contributes to the department total. Summary totals and their contributing detail rows cannot be combined in the same department and category.
A new identifier mapping applies to newly reviewed uploads. Replace an earlier month’s complete report when its attribution needs correcting. Saved comparisons retain their previous interpretation.
Compare and save
Choose Compare spending. Select an approved budget edition, departments, first and final expense months, and a saved comparison name.
Positive Actuals minus budget means above budget. Negative means below budget. For a 10,000 budget and 9,600 recorded expense, the variance is 400 below budget. If matching expected employee cost is 9,000, recorded expense is 600 above expectation.
A month without an import is Not imported. Missing expenses or unmatched budget coverage make the complete variance unavailable. FTE Tree does not substitute zero or compare partial actuals with the full budget. Expected employee cost appears only when its calculation and cost coverage are available.
Saved comparisons retain their selected budget, expense revisions, values, currency, and department interpretation. Use Download saved comparison in Actions to export those saved values. Current access is checked again. Open the shared activity clock beside the page actions to review publication or comparison activity.
The Expected employee cost status records whether calculations were up to date when you saved the comparison and identifies when the calculation completed. If newer changes were still processing, saved expected costs use the last completed calculation. Saved values and their status do not refresh. Save a new comparison to use later results; recorded expenses and their budget variance remain independent of expected-cost calculation progress.
Done when: the saved comparison identifies the intended budget edition and months, all included departments have the required coverage, and its totals match the finance report.
Correct a published month
Upload the complete corrected department-month report and new independent controls. Give a replacement reason, review the currently published totals, and publish. Identical current content does not add expenses twice. If another person publishes a replacement while you review, upload again to review the new current version.
Finance decides which expense month receives a correction. A later employee transfer does not move historical expenses. Live payroll connections, payroll processing, currency conversion, and automatic actuals-to-forecast blending are outside this workflow.