Understanding drivers and how are they used
The drivers we create in Jirav define rules, growth rates and assumptions for the different areas of your financial plan.
To start building our drivers, we should begin by asking the questions, 'what is the intended output?' and, 'what are we trying to see?'. This will establish the type of driver that needs to be set up in the system.
Establishing your driver type
As there are many different aspects in each business, there are also specific driver types that tie to each part of your business.
In the video example above, we've created an OpEx driver that makes marketing costs move as a function of all product revenue (in this case, 15%).
Base assumptions that tie to # of bookings would be a "bookings" driver, whereas business driven by staff or headcount would be created as "staff" or "OpEx" drivers and so on. Other examples include COGS, CapEx, income statement and balance sheet drivers; all varieties can be found in the Drivers section of Jirav.
Revenue and staffing drivers help with correct headcount assumptions as they relate to revenue and customer count. For instance, if we're establishing how many engineering hires are needed for projected customer growth, we'd build an output that links "staff" to "customers" (some figure of customers to engineering hires). In other words, we're building an assumption that ties engineering headcount to revenue.
This construction is displayed in the screenshot below and shows the first dimension; 'count of all customers buying all products', divided by a 'constant of 50', to get the rule, 1 engineer hired per 50 customers.
Output= Engineering, growth-based hire: engineering hire /# of new accounts.
The driver created would look like this:
We can also make driver assumptions upon existing staff.
Imagine your business needs to hire 1 QA headcount per 30 developers. While the engineers in the above example would be hired from your customer count, your engineering QA hires would be built upon how many engineers you've already hired.
The below would be the first part of your formula, and a constant of 30 would be your second.
The resulting driver would look like this:
Tips on setting up drivers in Jirav
If you're creating a formula that points to a duplicate dimension in error, you will get a message citing a circular dependency
If you need to create a formula with a figure/assumption that did not previously live in your actuals, you can easily do so, but you must first custom create that custom line.
To create a custom line, go to Setup ( far right of the app, where your company name appears)
From here, go to Custom Lines (in the top bar), where you'll manually any custom line that you need for your driver.
