Spreading in Contributor Question

[youngjedi]

When a budgeting row has all zeros for the month and we enter a number in the Total column, Contributor complains about spreading a zero (something like that) and doesn’t make the total spread to the months. If there are numbers in the months, it works fine and spreads the number proportionally as expected. Just complains if all the columns are 0 to begin with. Any ideas?

Thanks

[Olivier]

If the spreading method is a proportional spread,
you need to have reference numbers in the target cells to spread to so the numbers distribution can drive the proportionality for the spreading.

I think you would have to initialise the target areas for the spreading with numbers.

Hope this helps,

[youngjedi]

Thanks Oliver. How would I initialise? I'm not sure what that means.

[Olivier]

1 - Initialise the budget lines with data which represent the relevant proportionality but do not hold the final volume you want to budget.
In our environment, the business users select a set of actual weeks from a prior year that represent the best the business as usual cost distribution by account for example.
These data are send in budget version to pre populate the budget lines with a distribution representing a profile.

Total Cost = 100
Costline 1 = 50
Costline 2 = 50

2 - Define budget for the higher level
Total Cost = 1 000 000 000

3 - Mix the budget defined with the initialisation data through a proportional spreading.
We take the data from step 2 (Budget values) and spread them on the data from step 1 (budget initialisation data ).

Budget Initialisation data prior to spread =
Total Cost = 100
Costline 1 = 50
Costline 2 = 50

Budget data post spread =
Total Cost = 1 000 000 000
Costline 1 = 500 000 000
Costline 2 = 500 000 000

Hope this helps,

[Andy Key]

Since 9.5.2 the default behaviour has been to use an equal spread to the leaf cells where all data in the consolidation is zero.

Depending on your interface you may have to use the Pnnn spreading shortcut to get this to work. Last time I tried this the P had to be a P not a p.

ProportionSpreadToZeroCells