8.10 (Mandatory) Defining Time Buckets

Time buckets allow you to specify the time periods used for storing and reporting results. Within the Time Bucket rule, Income Simulation Buckets (also known as Modeling Buckets) set the modeling horizon for date-related business rules. When you change the number or frequency of the modeling buckets, existing rules are affected, so use caution before changing your active time bucket rule.

Forecast Rules that have time bucket dependencies do not adjust dynamically if you change the modeling buckets in your Time Bucket Rule.

Within a Time Bucket rule, you can specify any combination of days, months, and years when setting up the buckets. Although all Oracle ALM cash flows are generated daily, they are aggregated into defined modeling buckets when results are stored. ALM BI Reports access information from the modeling buckets and let you aggregate buckets. For example, you can define monthly modeling buckets but generate a quarterly income statement. On the other hand, you cannot generate a weekly balance sheet if all modeling buckets are monthly.

If you want to use different configurations of modeling buckets, such as all monthly or all quarterly, you should create a separate Time Bucket rule for each and use a naming convention to identifythe distinctions. All date-related assumption rules should be defined and used in the context of a single set of modeling buckets or a single Time Bucket rule.

Defining Time Buckets is a mandatory step in setting up and configuring the Oracle ALM application. Defining Dynamic Start Dates

In addition to defining Income Simulation Buckets, Time Bucket rules also allow you to define separate bucket assumptions for Interest Rate GAP and Liquidity GAP results in a single rule. This capability allows you to minimize the number of Time Bucket rules required to support all of your calculations.

You can also define future start dates (also known as Dynamic Start Dates) within either of the Interest Rate or Liquidity GAP bucket windows.

The following example illustrates how to define additional Dynamic Interest Rate GAP and (or) Liquidity GAP buckets within Time Bucket Rules.

The Time Bucket window shows the setup of an additional Dynamic Start Date set to begin at As_of_date + 3 days. If the forecast contains new business assumptions that occur between the As of Date and Dynamic Start Date 2, then they will be included in the output.