New Feature: Media Plan Advanced Budgets over a Timeline

Release date: February 3, 2023

A key benefit of media planning software is the ability to manage budgets.

MediaPlanHQ provided budget management at the media plan, campaign and organization level. 

But what if you manage your budgets by month or by quarter? You had to use campaigns  as your timeline buckets - A campaign per month, or a campaign per quarter - which defies the intended use of campaigns.

With this release, you can now define budgets per organization over a timeline in a media plan.

This gives you flexibility on the structure of your media plan versus your budgets.  For example, you can have an annual media plan with a quarterly budget.

Let's see how it works...

Existing users: Advanced budgets is an opt-in feature per media plan.  You must enable it on a media plan in order to use it.  Otherwise, nothing changes for you.

Enabling advanced budget

By default, the budgets in a media plan are total budgets by organization. 

To enable advanced budgets, you must configure a Budget timeline for a media plan.  The Budget timeline defines how you want to distribute the budgets by organization over time - by month, by quarter, or by year:

When updating a media plan with no Budget timeline to a timeline, you will be able to define a total budget by organization - These total budgets will be distributed evenly throughout the selected timeline upon saving.

When updating a media plan with a Budget timeline, you won't be able to define a total budget by organization - You must use the advanced budgets editor.

Note that changing the Budget timeline of an existing media plan will split or merge the existing budgets into the new timeline.

Defining advanced budgets over time

You must use the Advanced budgets editor to define budgets over time when a Budget timeline is defined on a media plan.

You can either start the editor on:

1. All the organizations of the media plan,
2. All the organizations of a given organization group of the media plan, or
3. A given organization of the media plan

The Advanced budgets editor displays a matrix of budgets for the selected organizations over the selected timeline:

The total row and total column automatically sum the corresponding budgets.

You can change the budget directly in the cell, or use the budget actions to copy/distribute a given budget on the given row/column:

Viewing budgets in the Planning module

The Planning module is now contextual to the Budget timeline when filtering by the run date with a complete timeline increment.

For example, the Planning module will display the budget information for the month of January when the media plan Budget timeline is by Month and your run date filter is exactly the month of January:

 

Analyzing expenses versus budgets

The Analysis view of the Planning module now includes the budget and remaining budget over time based on the Budget timeline of the media plan:

--

That's it ! We hope you'll enjoy the Advanced budget over a timeline. 

Give it a try and let us know what you think !

As always, don't hesitate to send us your great feedback or other ideas for new features !

Have a great day,

The MediaPlanHQ team