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About the Budget Report

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The Budget report allows you to compare your budgeted costs to your actual costs (or for the current, partial billing cycle projected costs). This report provides a way to view and edit your yearly budgets at the monthly level. Before you can create a Budget report, you must actually have budget data available for comparison.

The Budget report interface allows you to choose a starting billing period, in terms of year and month and then specify how many subsequent billing cycles to look at. You may also choose to “project” (estimate) costs for the current partial billing cycle.

Using the budget report for a meter requires that you have a monthly budget for each month that you are interested in. After you have entered budget data, you can define the report parameters, run the report and assess the data that it presents.

Entering a budget

The budget entry view is the screen that provides fields for entering a budget for a meter. There are two ways to access the budget entry view:

• use the 'Enter Budget' tab on the Configuration view
• click the 'Enter Budget' button at the bottom of the Budget report screen, to bring up the entry view.

  Note: Only administrators can enter a budget. If you are logged in as a user without admin write access, you will not be allowed to get to the Enter Budget view (just like Create-A-Rate, etc.).

Figure 4-41 is an example of a Budget report.

Figure 4-41 Budget Report Example.

About projected costs

Projected costs are costs that are calculated when the current partial billing cycle is included in the Budget report billing period. Projected cost is based on calculated values for time expired in the current billing cycle. For example, a projected consumption value is determined by dividing the total billing cycle time by the time that has expired in the billing cycle. That quotient is multiplied by the actual consumption values (to-date) to arrive at the projected cost, as illustrated in the following equation.

Demand costs are simply the peak demand found to date, so a computation based on time expired does not affect demand cost projection.

• Confidence Factor

  Since the projected costs are estimated, a “confidence factor” is calculated to help you judge the reliability of the projection. Basically, the confidence factor is inversely proportional to how much time is remaining in the billing cycle. The confidence factor is displayed in terms of percentage, with a higher percentage being a higher confidence factor, reflecting less possibility for changes in the projection.

About the Budget Report Display

The Budget report shows how actual costs compare to budgeted costs by presenting this data side by side in parallel columns for as many billing cycles as you specify. The actual difference as well as the percentage difference between budget and actual costs is displayed as well. Details are also provided for each billing cycle.

Following are the primary display panes in the Budget Report:

Figure 4-42 Budget Report Display Areas.

• Site Tree Window

  This window works like all other site tree windows. See "Site Tree Window", for details.

• Billing Period

  Select the desired billing period start date (month and year) and enter the number of consecutive billing cycles to include for the budget report. You may choose to project costs for the current incomplete billing cycle (refer to "About projected costs") by selecting the “Project costs for partial billing cycles” check box.

• Summary Pane

  Once a report is run, the Summary pane displays four columns of data, as described below, with column totals at the bottom:

  • Budgeted Cost

    Shows the budgeted values for each month.

  • Actual Cost

    Shows the actual values for each month.

  • Difference

    Shows the Actual Cost minus the Budgeted Cost for each month.

  • % Difference.

    Shows percent over or under budget (to the nearest tenth of a percentage point).

• Details Pane

  After running a Budget report, you can click on any individual billing cycle (by month) in the summary pane to see the details for that month in the Details Pane on the right. The details pane shows a breakdown of the costs that went into the total for the billing cycle.

  Click the “Show Details” button to see additional details (as shown in Figure 4-43) for the month that is currently selected in the details pane. Details remain available, even when you select a different month, as long as the “Show Details” button is toggled on.

Figure 4-43 Billing Cycle Details.

Creating a Budget Report.

Create an Cost Ranking Report by performing the following tasks:

• Start the Report
• Enter a Budget
• Set Report Parameters

Start the Report

1. Launch shortBrandName from your browser using the following URL:http://hostname/eas
   where hostname is the name or IP address of the Web Supervisor.
2. Enter appropriate login information to gain access to the home page.

   Note: From within an existing report, it is easier to simply use the Goto: menu on the upper right to select the desired report, as an alternative to the following step.

3. From the shortBrandName home page, open Budget Report by clicking on the Budget Report link. The Budget Report template displays.

Enter a Budget

1. To enter a budget for a meter, do one of the following:
   • From the Configuration page, click the Enter Budget tab. The budget entry page appears as one of the tabbed option displays.
   • From the Budget report page, click the Enter Budget button.
     The Enter Budget dialog box appears in a popup window.

     Note: It does not matter how you access the budget entry display. The fields and information in the popup dialog box are identical to those in the configuration page tabbed display.

Figure 4-44 Enter Budget Display

2. In the “Select a Budget Year” field, type in a year for the budget information that you are editing.
3. In the Sites tree, select the meter that you want to edit budget costs for. The fields in the Budget area are now editable.
4. Enter budget cost information for each individual month that is displayed by typing the data into each Budge Cost field, for all 12 months, OR do step 5, below:
5. Apply historical values to Budget Cost fields by using the following controls:
   • In the Historical Year field, type in the year of the data that you want to retrieve.
   • From the Use Historical option list, select one of the following options to specify which historical costs to use:
     • Actual Cost
     • Budget Cost
     • Calculated Cost
   • Select or clear the Normalization option. If you want to normalize the historical data for weather, select this option, type in a degree day temperature, and choose desired units (C, K, or F). Refer to "Types of Normalization" on page 3-67 for more information about normalizing data.
6. Select or clear the Data Cleansing option, as desired, to filter historical data used. "About Data Cleansing" for details about data cleansing. If you select Data Cleansing, enter an integer in the Window parameter field and a percentage in percent field.
7. Click the Apply Historical Values button. Historical data will populate the Budget Cost fields.

   Note: If no values fill the Budget Cost fields after clicking the Apply Historical Values button, then there is probably no historical data available. Try selecting different historical value parameters or enter the data manually.

8. All nodes in the site tree are dimmed (not editable) until the report changes are saved, discarded, or the report is deleted. Click one of the following buttons:.
   • Save Changes – to save the budget data in the currently displayed budget.
   • Save/Continue – to save the budget data in the currently displayed report and increment the year number in “Select a Budget Year” and “Historical Year” fields

     Note: It is possible to unintentionally delete budget data. Before discarding or deleting data be sure to check the Budget Year field so that you are fully aware of the time range of the data you are discarding or deleting.

   • Discard Changes – to delete current budget data changes and revert to the previously saved budget information for the currently displayed budget.
   • Delete a Budget – to delete the currently displayed budget.

Set Report Parameters

1. In the site tree, click on the desired site or meter. You may aggregate meters (refer to "Aggregating meters" for details on aggregating). You may also select a site to run a report on all meters under the site.

   Note: Default data for Budget Cost fields is $0.00. Make sure that all “aggregated” meters (or meters under sites that are targeted for Budget reports) have individual budget cost data for each meter or the Budget report may not produce usable information.

2. Select a month and year for the Starting Billing period fields.
3. Enter the desired number of billing cycles to include in the report.
4. Select or clear the “Project costs for partial billing cycles” option, as desired. When this option is selected, the current partial billing cycle will have projected costs calculated, if appropriate. Projected values are always displayed with a yellow background in both the Summary and Details pane of the Budget report.
5. Click on Run Report to create the report. Figure 4-45 is an example of a Budget report using sample data.

Figure 4-45 Budget Report Sample.