Learn what a global driver is and how it is useful to planning and reporting
Drivers are formulas that you create in Jirav to calculate other lines in the model, such as rent expenses or to track KPIs such as Revenue Per Employee. Some drivers are specific to individual scenarios while others are the same across multiple scenarios.
How Global Drivers are used
Now you can create Global Drivers, which are applied to every plan. Even plans you create in the future will have these drivers. If you update these drivers, they automatically update in all the plans including your Actuals.
This is very useful for defining formulas that remain the same in every scenario. For example, let’s say we want to track Revenue Per Employee (RPE) as a KPI. The formula for that will be Revenue ÷ Headcount. In one of our plans, we may have high revenue and a low headcount while another plan may have a lower revenue and a higher headcount. This means each scenario will yield a different value for Revenue per Employee, but the actual formula used in every plan will be the same.
Let’s say then we decide to add another revenue stream to the business. We may decide we now want to track two different KPIs for each revenue stream.
We could define RPE (Services) as:
Revenue: Service Revenue / Headcount: Service Dept.
RPE (Product) would be:
Revenue: Product Revenue / Headcount: Product Dept.
We now don’t have to go into each plan to create these new formulas manually. These redefinitions and updates to our KPIs will automatically be available in every plan. The formula will also apply to your historical financial data so you can see if the trend is reasonable or within expectation.
Exceptions:
- Plan of Records are frozen as read-only and can never be updated. So new global drivers or changes to global drivers do not impact any existing Plans of Record.
- Global Drivers can only be used to drive global lines in the model. Any lines that are local to a plan are not accessible to a global driver. E.g. a Product created within an individual plan, or a staffing role that only exists in a specific plan can’t be driven by a global driver.