Plan Drivers.

Use drivers to create formulas to forecast based on your business assumptions

Plan Drivers are an extremely powerful tool that can be leveraged to forecast the value of accounts within your financial plan by defining rules, growth rates, targets, assumptions & other interdependencies.  For example, all of the below could be modeled using plan drivers:

• Calculate product revenue as a function of units * price
• Purchase a laptop for each new hire and show the effect to fixed assets on the balance sheet as well as depreciation on the income statement
• Hire a new customer success representative for every 100 new customers 
• Set a budget of $12,000 for the year that automatically recalculates based on YTD actuals as the forecast is rolled forward 
• Allocate Rent to departments based on Headcount 

 

Article Contents

• Overview of Plan Drivers
• How to add/edit/delete drivers from plan tables
• How to clone & bulk add drivers
• Overview of the Drivers Page

Visit the Standard Drivers help article for additional information about the fields within each driver type and the corresponding formula logic.

Driver Architecture Overview 

• Drivers are formulaic expressions that can be associated with any GL account or Custom Line. 
• Drivers are additive in nature meaning a single account or line can have multiple drivers associated with it.
• Selecting the account or custom line name will expose any associated drivers. Clicking on the driver name itself will then display the formula as pictured below.
• There are 4 categories of plan drivers: Standard, Allocation, CapEx & Staffing.
• Drivers can be added in bulk to multiple accounts & departments in one action.
• Drivers can apply to all time periods or to a specific time period.

Adding, Editing & Deleting Drivers from the Plan Tables

Adding New Drivers

To add a Standard Driver from a plan table, navigate to the desired plan table and either:

• Select the Add Driver button from the toolbar, choose the desired Standard Driver type, select the account(s) and department(s) to apply the driver, populate the applicable inputs and Save.
  
  OR
• Select the ellipsis (...) to the left of an account to open the context menu, choose the desired Standard Driver type, optionally update the account(s) & department(s) to apply to the driver (the driver output will automatically default to the account & department of the row), populate the applicable inputs and Save.

Visit the Standard Drivers help article for additional information about the fields within each driver type and the corresponding formula logic.

Editing Existing Drivers

To Edit an existing driver, click on the account with a driver to expose the driver(s), select the driver row that you'd like to edit then click on the pencil ✏️ icon from the formula bar. 

Deleting Existing Drivers

To Delete an existing driver, click on the account with a driver to expose the driver(s), select the driver row that you'd like to edit then click on the Trash 🗑️ icon from the formula bar. Alternatively, you can click on the ellipsis (...) to open the context menu and select Delete Driver. 

Cloning & Adding Drivers in Bulk

There are two ways you can streamline the addition of new drivers in your model, Cloning & Bulk Drivers.

Cloning creates an exact copy of an existing driver. Cloning is most appropriate when you are adding a new, similar item, e.g., a new department, to an existing model. For example, let's say you are using Custom Drivers to calculate Bonus for each Department as Salary * an Assumed Bonus % and you just added a new Department to your company.  In this scenario, you could clone the Bonus driver from an existing Department into the new Department. 

Bulk Drivers create multiple Drivers in one action across multiple account(s) and/or department(s). Bulk Driver Addition is most appropriate when you are creating an entirely new model. This is often only used during an initial model implementation, but is also available for use post implementation. For example, let's say you have a brand new Jirav model and want to set up drivers for each Department to calculate Bonus as Salary * an Assumed Bonus % . In this scenario, you could use Bulk Drivers to create a Custom Driver for each Department in one action. 

Cloning Drivers

To Clone an existing driver, click on the account that contains the driver you'd like to clone to expose the driver(s), select the driver row that you'd like to clone then click click on the ellipsis (...) to open the context menu and select Clone Driver. 

Cloning the Driver creates an identical copy of the driver that was cloned. Be sure to edit the cloned driver to make any applicable updates. For example, if you are intending to clone the driver into a new department, you'll want to update the department output.

Bulk Drivers

To bulk create a driver across multiple account(s) and or departments(s), select Add Driver from the desired Plan table and update the Apply To account(s) & Department(s) field to include all applicable account(s) and department(s). Then populate the additional applicable inputs and Save.

Drivers Page 

The drivers page aggregates all of your drivers across the given plan and display in the legacy driver view format.