Designing Your Budget Plans

A budget plan contains the business rules that govern:

• How the recommended budget amount is calculated.
• When and how a customer on an ongoing budget plan will have their budget amount periodically trued up.
• The conditions under which the system will highlight an existing budget amount as being anomalous with the customer's current use patterns.

You will need multiple budget plans if any of the above rules / conditions differ for different types of customers. For example, if residential customers use a different recommended budget algorithm as compared to commercial customers, you'd need one budget plan for residential and another for commercial.

We'll design budget plans to satisfy the needs of a theoretical company to help you understand how to design your budget plans. The following points describe the budget requirements of our theoretical company:

• The recommended budget amount is the last year's real bill amounts plus any existing debit/credit balance divided by 12. This is true regardless of the type of customer.
• The frequency of budget true up is monthly for commercial customers and annually for residential customers.
• The system should highlight when a residential customer's budget is more than 30% out of whack with what their budget amount would be if it was recalculated.
• The system should highlight when a commercial customer's budget is more than 20% out of whack with what their budget amount would be if it was recalculated.

You'd need the following budget plans to satisfy the above requirement:

Refer to the Page Controls under Setting Up Budget Plans for a description of the various algorithms defined in respect of a budget plan.