Fund activities with investments
To provide visibility into how your marketing activities are funded, you can create connections between your investments in Uptempo Financial Management, and your marketing activities in Uptempo Campaign Management.
You can connect an investment to one or multiple activities. This means that a single investment can be used to fund multiple activities, or that a single activity can be funded from multiple investments. After you create a connection, you can decide how the funds from the investment line item are allocated to the connected activity (or activities).
Connections between investments and activities are shown in both Uptempo Financial Management and Uptempo Campaign Management, when you view the details of the connected investment items and activities.
Allocation of funds to connected activities
There are two parts to connecting an investment to an activity: connection and allocation.
- Connection
Establishing a link between a specific activity and a specific investment.
- Allocation
Assigning an amount of an investment's funds to connected activities.
By default, Uptempo will automatically allocate all of an investment's funds to connected activities:
If only one activity is connected, 100% of the funds are allocated to that activity.
If multiple activities are connected, the funds are split equally between all connected activities.
You also have additional options for customizing how funds are allocated to connected activities, including setting funds allocations manually. For details, see Set how funds are distributed to connected activities.
Connections at different levels of the investment hierarchy
You can make connections between an activity and any category, sub-category, or line item. Of the three types of investment item, only line items are associated with funds amounts. When you connect a category or sub-category to an activity, the funds that are allocated to the activity are the funds that belong to line items within the category or sub-category. As a result, when a category or sub-category is connected to an activity, all line items within it are also considered to be "indirectly" connected to the same activity.
If a line item has an indirect connection to an activity (because its parent category or sub-category is connected to that activity), you can still create direct connection between that line item and an activity. In this case, the activity you connect can be:
The same activity that is connected to the parent
A child activity of the activity connected to the parent
An unrelated activity from a different part of the activity hierarchy
If you choose to connect the line item to an activity that is in an unrelated part of the activity hierarchy, this is called an out-of-boundary connection, because it is not compatible with the existing activity connection on the line item's parent category or sub-category. When this happens, the system automatically adjusts the connections to resolve the situation.
Resolving out-of-boundary connections
When you create an out-of-boundary connection on a line item, this creates a conflict with the existing activity connection on the line item's parent category or sub-category. To resolve this conflict, the system takes the following actions (after prompting you for confirmation):
Remove the existing connection between the parent category/sub-category and the original activity
Create the out-of-boundary connection to the new activity on the specified line item
Automatically create new connections at the line item level between all other existing line items in the parent category/sub-category and the original activity (to replace the parent-level connection)
This procedure allows you to create the out-of-boundary connection, while still maintaining all existing connections between all other affected line items and the original activity (by replacing the indirect connections through the parent with direct connections on the line items themselves).
Next steps
For instructions on how to connect activities to investments and allocate their funds, see Connect activities to investments.
For instructions on how to adjust funds allocations, see Set how funds are distributed to connected activities.