Refining the budgets hierarchy and informations RFC

RFC: refining the budgets hierarchy and informations

We want to change the structure of budgets by:

• merging the notions of fund and budget into a single notion of budget and
• allowing for a hierarchy of budgets

On page admin/aqbudget.pl, the new form to enter budgets would sport a few more fields; current fields would be kept; they are:

• Budget code
• Budget full name
• Start date
• End date
• initial budget amount
• branch (optional)

We would add the following fields:

• a dropdown for "parent budget", which is a list of existing budgets, in a hierarchy, with root as a default.

An example would be:

• root
  • novels
    • novels in english
    • novels in french
  • dvd
  • etc

We would also add:

• an "encumbrance alert" text box. If the budget is of, say, $1000 and this parameter is 10%, Koha outputs an alert as soon as someone tries to save an order that will leave less than $100 available in the budget. If the value is 0% Koha will let the available amount go down to 0 but not run into negatives: encumbrances+spent = $1010 will not be allowed. If the value is empty, Koha will do nothing.
• an "expenditure alert" text box. Same thing as above, for spent amounts.
• a note field
• 2 authorized values fields, to be used for reports and statistics

Koha will also give the list of librarians who have the right permissions for budget_invoice and/or budget_encumbrance (see Managing permissions on acquisition module): one can select logins in the list, or "select all" (default) to link them to this particular budget.