Now that you have decided to “Just Do It” and use our Budget Planning tool, let’s get started on the right foot. It begins with the basics of setting up a budget and understanding the concepts Budget Term and Budget Interval.
Budget Term is the full length of the contract, the start and end date. It may be seasonal, annual, or even shorter if it’s a one-time project. Let’s say you have an annual budget. For the start and end dates, enter January 1 to December 31. Then enter the total budgeted hours for the year. For example, if your budget is to clean a building 10 hours a month, budgeted hours for the year are 120. If you are jumping in midseason, but have timecards in our system since the first of the year, go ahead and still create the annual budget with the total hours for the year. We will apply all of the actual hours year-to-date against the live budget. New customers can define the Budget Term for the balance of the year and enter the budgeted hours remaining. As a general rule, use the contract end date so the system can predict where the budget is headed.
Budget Interval, on the other hand, equates to how you choose to monitor the budget. This can be a weekly, monthly, quarterly or custom interval. The main idea of Budget Planning is to help you make better decisions. How often do you need to break out status updates on the health of a budget in order to make the best decisions? The system automatically flags each interval in red, yellow or green based on the variances between the interval budget and the actuals. In the example of a yearly budget with 120 hours, you may choose a monthly interval. Set up the Budget Intervals for a monthly distribution. Our system can evenly distribute the 120 hours across 12 months. Or you can choose to have the system weight the distribution by days in the interval (February only has 28 days, and would be allocated less hours). Tighter budgets may require more diligent screening with a weekly interval. We also give you the option to customize the intervals by manually entering the numbers. For example, you may create a budget with weekly intervals that are evenly disbursed, but then you can customize the weeks if holiday weekends need more or less hours.
It is easy to get started. Create your budget and input the total number of hours for the budget term and then track by your chosen interval, weekly, monthly, quarterly or custom. Once you have created the budget Chronotek does the hard part.
Enjoy the power of predictive technology and future vision.