Modelling budget scenarios

Scenarios let you model named alternatives, such as a lean year against a full-reserve year, without changing the budget you are modelling against. Open them from Scenarios in the budget editor.

What a scenario is

A scenario is three settings laid over the draft budget: an overall fee percentage, a reserve level, and any number of per-category overrides. It records those settings, not the figures they produce. Creating, editing, deleting or reverting a scenario writes nothing to the budget itself.

Because a scenario stores settings rather than figures, its numbers always recompute from the budget as it stands right now. A scenario cannot quietly go stale and show you last week's totals.

Create one

1. Go to Scenarios and select New Scenario.
2. Give it a Scenario name the people reading it will recognise, such as "Lean year" or "Full reserve funding".
3. Set the Overall fee %. This applies to the whole draft budget unless a category below overrides it.
4. Choose a Reserve contribution level: Fully Funded (RFS target), Threshold Funded, or Statutory Minimum.
5. Add any Per-group overrides you need. Each one names a category and a value, expressed either as a percentage or as an annual dollar figure. A category can carry only one override.
6. Save the scenario.

Each saved scenario shows its Overall fee, Reserve level and Overrides on its card, so you can compare them at a glance.

You can keep up to five scenarios per budget. The limit is enforced by the database, not just by the screen, so it holds even if two people are working at once. At the cap the button explains itself: Cap reached (5 of 5). Delete a scenario to add another.

Mark one as recommended

Exactly one scenario can carry the Recommended mark. Marking a new one clears the previous one in the same save, so there is never a moment where two scenarios are both recommended or none is.

Change history and revert

Every scenario keeps a History, and it records the actual settings before and after each change, not a count of what moved. Each entry names what happened (created, updated, reverted, marked or unmarked as recommended), who did it and when, and shows the old and new values for Name, Overall fee, Reserve level and Overrides.

It records settings only, never computed figures, for the same reason the scenario itself does: a stored figure from three weeks ago is a lie once the budget moves.

To go back, open the history and choose Revert to this on the entry you want. The confirmation names the date you are reverting to and reminds you that the monthly fee will recalculate live from those settings against the current budget. The revert is itself recorded as a new history entry, so nothing is erased.

If a category was deleted from the budget in the meantime, URBI tells you how many overrides it restored and how many it could not, rather than silently dropping them.

Activating the budget

When you activate a budget you choose which scenario it was activated with, and no scenario is always a legal answer. The choice and the activation are recorded together in one step, so the record can never show a budget as active without saying what it was activated on.

Activation is the one point where a scenario does change your figures. Modelling never touches a budget line, but activating a budget with a scenario writes that scenario's per-category overrides into those categories and across all twelve of their months. Each category that moved is recorded with its amount before and after. If you want the draft activated exactly as you built it, activate with no scenario.

Scenarios stay editable after the budget goes active, and the Scenarios view says so. You can keep modelling next year's options against a live budget without archiving anything.

Who can see this

Scenarios are staff-only. Residents cannot read them, and neither can anyone without budget access on the property.

Related

• Editing the Budget Grid
• Explaining Your Budget Numbers
• How to activate a budget