Budgets

Understand the basics

It’s important to understand that Budget is not only the name of the component, but is also an entity of the component. Indeed, a same Budget component can contain multiple budgets.

This allows to create complex workflows and answer several use cases.

Configuration

Once you created your Budget component, you are redirected to the Budget list. There, you can create and manage the budgets of your component. Depending on the process you want to organize, you can choose:

To create a unique budget, where all your projects to be voted on are displayed.
To create multiple budgets, with dedicated projects inside each of them.

The first thing to do is to create your first budget, by clicking the "New budget" button.

Budget creation

Table 1. New budget form
Field	Type	Description
Title	Required	What is the title of this budget. For instance, "District A"
Order position	Optional	Which order it has in relation to the other budgets. Having a lower number means a higher priority. For instance, if you have two budgets, "Budget a" with weight "10" and "Budget b" with weight "0" then "Budget b" is first when ordering.
Description	Optional	The description of this budget, only displayed visible by participants if there is multiple budgets.
Total budget	Required	The total amount of money available for this budget.

Manage budgets

On the budgets list in the administration panel, administrators can see:

Name: Name of the budget.
Total budget: The total budget allocated to the budget.
Projects count: The number of projects included in each budget.

This page also lets you see the finished and pending votes that the various projects have received across all budgets.

You can also export all the projects of the component in different formats in CSV, JSON and Excel formats.

Actions

Table 2. Actions
Icon	Name	Definition
	Edit	To edit the budget.
	Manage projects	Allows to manage the projects of a budget.
	Preview	To see the budget page in the user interface.
	Delete	To delete this budget. Can only be done when there aren’t any projects.

Workflows

One neat feature of the Budgets component is the ability to define your own workflows.

This means that you can define multiple Budgets, for instance one for every city neighborhood or district, define multiple rules regarding how people can vote on those Budgets. By default, three workflows are available:

Vote in one: allows participants to vote in any budget, but only in one.
Vote in all: allows participants to vote in all budgets.
Vote in a random component: allows participants to vote only in one budget, selected randomly.

This can be extended in your application by a developer, by developing your own Workflows. For instance for the 2020/2021 Participatory Budgeting Process in Decidim Barcelona, the people could vote in two districts: the one where they lived and one of their choosing. This was defined in the decidim-barcelona application itself.

You can read more about Workflows in decidim-budgets README.md.

You only want to have a voting without much complications? Like a city-wide vote? Don’t worry: if you define only one Budget, then people are redirected directly on the projects list.