Siebel Marketing User Guide > Planning and Budgeting for Marketing > Process of Creating Marketing Plans and Budget Requests >

About Developing and Tracking Budgets for Marketing Plans

You can use marketing plans to develop budgets. As you implement tactics, you can track the financial status of the marketing plan. A marketing plan contains financial details that provide visibility across your company's marketing spending. The following list includes some of the financial details you may want to use:

• Authors of the plan can add the expected cost of the plan and owners of the budget can allocate money to the plan.
• An associated group of budget requests so that tactic owners can send requests for funding through an approval process.
• A list of tactics, including their requested and allocated budgets, can be associated with the plan.
• Financial summary fields can calculate the forecast and actual revenue and expenses for the tactics in the plan.

Use the marketing plan to review and approve budgets, to forecast expenses and revenues, and to record actual expenses and revenues for the campaigns, events, and programs in your organization. The marketing plan provides the following categories of values for managing marketing budgets:

• Requested and Assigned Budget. The Plan Tactics view tab contains two fields that show how much money the plan owner has requested (Requested Budget) and how much money has been approved by the budget owner (Assigned Budget). These fields can be edited.
• Forecast and Actual Expenses. The total forecast and actual expenses across tactics in the marketing plan.
  • Forecast Expenses. Total forecast expense value for expense records associated with the tactics (programs, campaigns, and events) in the marketing plan.
  • Actual Expenses. Total actual expense value for expense records associated with the tactics in the marketing plan.

    Table 7 identifies the location of expense data for each type of tactic.

    Table 7. Expense Source Fields (Forecast and Actual)

    Tactic Type	Where to Find the Input Data
    Event Plans	Events screen > Event Plans > Plan > Expenses
    Events	Events screen > Plan > Expenses
    Programs	Programs screen > Plan > Expenses Campaigns screen > Plan > Expenses (for campaigns associated to programs)
    Standalone Campaigns	Campaigns screen > Plan > Expenses

• Forecast and Actual Revenue. The total actual expenses and revenues across tactics in the marketing plan. The Plan Details view tab includes a Financial Summary section summarizing total revenues for the tactics in the plan.

  Table 8 identifies the location of revenue data for each type of tactic.

  Table 8. Revenue Goals Source Fields (Forecast and Actual)

  Tactic Type	Where to Find the Input Data
  Campaigns	Campaigns screen > Plan view tab > Goals link
  Event Plans	Events screen > Event Plans link > Plans view tab > Revenue link
  Programs	Programs screen > Plan view tab > Goals link

  • Forecast Revenue. A total of forecast values for revenue goals such as forecast amount for tactics in the marketing plan.
  • Actual Revenue. The Total Order Revenue for orders associated with a tactic using values obtained from the Siebel Analytics Server after the Siebel Data Warehouse is populated from the Siebel transactional database. If the value from the Analytics Server is not integrated into your environment, the value is blank.