Plan
When you start planning investments, you can structure the planned investments into categories and sub-categories. The investments are represented by line items.
- Example
Sheila plans to attend trade shows and summits for the America area. For the following year, she plans to attend the Oracle MME and Sirius Decision Summit. Oracle MME will incur costs in the following sections: registration, booth expenses, shipping, travel expenses. In general, there will be other costs that she will need to account for under one item. For Sirius Decision Summit, Sheila will need to plan costs for registration, booth costs, and travel to and from the event.
Sheila is also planning to visit another trade show. However, no final decision has been made yet, as there are several trade shows to choose from. Nevertheless, the money is to be budgeted.
In addition, Sheila plans for content creation costs. The content is to appear in the newsletter and provide information about the trade shows and summits.
What are categories, sub-categories, line items, and placeholders?
The line items represent the investments, and you can enter cost or spend data only for line items. To keep the overview, you structure the line items by categories and sub-categories.
Clicking the Category button inserts a folder on the top level. Clicking the Sub-category button adds a folder on the subordinate level of the marked row. The marked row is highlighted by the light purple shade. This allows sub-categories to be nested depending on how granular you are in organizing your marketing spend data.
Line items can be entered at any level.
Best practices
Be creative and organize your spend in a way that is intuitive to you by grouping similar investments (individual investment plans do not impact the types of reports that can be run from Uptempo, we arrange that separately from the investment plan organization).
Using a placeholder allows you to plan at a high-level and track costs at a granular level when forecast amounts are unknown. A placeholder is generally used during the planning phase and holds funds for future spend. It is used when the specific investments have not yet been determined, but funds need to be reserved in the overall allocation.
For example, when planning to attend a tradeshow you may have an estimated budget of $100,000 but may not specifically know how that money will be spent until further planning is done to determine individual investments at the tradeshow. To hold the funds in the budget you would add $100,000 in the Plan column of a placeholder for the month or quarter the tradeshow will take place.
Related actions
Next steps
Once investments are added, you add details and the planned spend for the investment, see Add data to investments.