For Federal customers, why we need to open a new budget year?

Hi everyone,

A new budget year is needed to enter budget journals or amounts so that fund control can be performed and probably also for encumbrance journals .  However as a Federal customer (I could be wrong here), 1) we don't enter budget journals/amounts, we use budget module and enter budgets to specific accounts with actual_flag = 'A', in other word, those budgets can be entered only to an open period; 2) we don't use encumbrance; 3) the fund control checks funding budget but in our case, I think it only checks the summary templates that associated with the funding budget, but