Clarifying the relationship between Original Budget And Revised Budget in IATI activities

I think this discussion was forgotten about a bit and is left unanswered. It would help to know the origin of why this attribute exists at all. Probably there was a reason that indicates that both can exist or only one of the two.

…by allowing analysis of how far budgets have historically been revised by.

That historical analysis would only be possible if you would keep track of all revisions of the budgets. If you would want to do that you need to know the dates on which the budgets were set to be able to know the history timeline and the actual budget. Imo that’s a use case IATI shouldn’t support, IATI is a snapshot of data and if you would want to do analysis you need to compare multiple snapshots on different dates.

From the element definition you could infer that it’s OK…

From the type attribute definition on the same page you could infer that it’s not OK; “Whether this is the original budget (prepared when the original commitment was made) or has subsequently been revised”. Though that definition could be interpreted as to be read from the perspective of one single budget element.

In the end I don’t care if either or both can exist, but I’m lost in how to interpret budgets and no one seems to know for sure. I also don’t want to rely on the Schema for this since the Schema only has basic rules implemented and hence I don’t know if its on purpose or if its a flaw in the schema (Its probably not even something the schema can check).

The original intention was never to provide an audit of changes, only to indicate to the user that one or more changes had been made since first published. Other than that the element only shows the current state of play.

Similarly a committed budget 'status=2' shouldn’t be changed, but there is no way of policing this.

Thank you for the clarification. I created a request to note this a bit more on the budget element page.

Is this something to propose as a rule for a next upgrade just to make sure everyone has that same interpretation?

Hi Rory,
I tend to agree with you. To avoid double counting of budgets within an activity your solution looks straightforward. IATI is i.m.o. not meant to publish the whole internal budgeting process of an organization.

What is important is the budget amount currently allocated to an activity in order to provide information on the intended amount to be spend on the whole life cycle of the activity. IATI is not an financial accounting tool.

Please do have a read over the latest guidance to date. One snippit is below.

● Budget element

When an activity budget is first published it will likely have the @type attribute ‘ original ’. If the budget value is later amended, this should be detailed by the adding of a new budget element containing the new value and @type attribute ‘ revised’ . The new revised figure should be added, rather than the difference from the original to the revised budget. Further changes to the budget should be added by changing the value in the ‘revised’ budget element, and not by adding multiple ‘revised’ budgets for the same time period.

A budget can also have one of two statuses:

● 1 - Indicative: A non-binding estimate for the described budget.

● 2 - Committed: A binding agreement for the described budget. When a budget changes status, the status of the existing budget element should change. A new budget element should not be created.

To calculate the total budget for an activity, a data user should be able to add up all the revised budget values which each cover different time periods. If not all time periods have a revised budget, then the original budget should be used for these periods.

the resulting guidance doc

This seems to say:

• if a budget changes type (original to revised) then publishers should add a new budget (but keep the original?)
  – but, only when the revised budget is changed, then no additional budget element should be added
• if a budget changes status (original > committed) then the no new budget element is published

Is that contrary to, or aligned with, what is discussed by Rory Scott & Herman van Loon ?

In terms of this guidance, I looked at both the budget element and budget overview pages, and found no mention or synery with this guidance document. This is rather concerning.

You’re correct that the guidance goes beyond what is in the IATI Standard and existing overview pages (soon to be removed). As this thread examples there’s ambiguity in the standard which we can’t formerly sort out until a major upgrade happens.

What we can and have been doing over the past 12 months is to develop guidance to complement the Standard. Such as the new guidance for SDG publishing and use. Similarly, this budget guidance provides more detail about how the budget elements and attributes ‘should’ be used.

The guidance was created in an open consultation and received no objection by the IATI community. It is not part of the Standard but comes alongside it. This also means we can’t validate against it. But it is an interim measure to help align data reporting and use until we can proceed with a major upgrade.

Hi Amy,
Do you remember if this consultation was on Discuss or was it a Webinar?

Regards
Herman