By Gurkan Ozfidan, TimeForge Developer
This is second in a two-part series. Read Budgeting Tools: Part I to help this post make more sense.
In Part I, it was mentioned that TimeForge has several budgeting options. One of the options was briefly covered in part I, and in this article we will cover the remaining 3 budgeting options.
In part I, we have talked about how TimeForge can help you to watch your budget as you make your schedule. Option 1, which was covered, could show our clients, based on sales category numbers, how many shifts you could have; cost or number of hours should be in your schedule per position. Should you desire, TimeForge could show you budgeting numbers in percentages as well.
From Sales Category settings, our clients could switch the settings to use percentages option by changing from drop-down formula list. By changing the formula setting from numerical comparison to percentage comparison, our thresholds numbers will be considered as percentage values. Even though we could still use our min and max limits in this formula, it may not be useful as it was in option 1.
Remember, by using min and max limit, we were making sure to have not less than X or not more than Y number of shifts, hours or cost. Those min and max limit, in option 2, would mean not less than X and not more than Y percentage. Since we are comparing our budget in percentages, limiting with min and max percentages may not be helpful in option 2. But since we have single check box which turns on and off to be included those min and max values in our formula, we can simply turned off and exclude our min and max values from our second formula if we need to.
Based on our sales category numbers, here could be estimated number of visits or gross sales for that day, and we can set percentages per position, and again we can limit duration of our percentages by begin and end dates as in option 1, the dates also could be used for seasonal periods. Simply, by using option 2, as you make your schedule and start adding shifts for positions, TimeForge will calculate what the current percentages and will compare with the limited percentages.
If the calculated percentage is less than or equal to, it will be colored as in green, if it is greater than limited percentages it will be colored as in red to indicate that current schedule is above your budget limits.
First two options of this budgeting tool, thresholds numbers for option 1, mentioned as numerical comparison, and percentages numbers for option 2, mentioned as percentage comparison values also can be stored in department level instead of position level as well.
Remaining two options are simple and a lot easier to use than first two options, and there are minimal differences between the two remaining option 3 and 4.
Instead of storing estimated number of visits or gross sales for the day as in option 1 and 2, you could store the limited cost or hours for that day to be scheduled as in sales category. Should you desire to use budgeting option 3, you could simply not select any of the formula drop-down lists and check ‘Direct comparison’ option, for to use budgeting option 4, simply you could select ‘Show Sales Numbers’ option from Sales Category settings.
Option 3, ‘Direct comparison’, will compare your current schedule number with the sales category number, and will color in green if it is less than or equal to, will color in red if it is greater than. Option 4, ‘Show Sales Numbers ’, will simply show the sales numbers with no comparison and coloring.
We have briefly covered all 4 options of budgeting tools that TimeForge currently has. We are constantly improving budgeting tools, and highly recommend checking out our new updates.
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