Allocations

When the Financial Management application allocates an expense, it breaks down the expense into detailed amounts of money called allocations.

The allocations are then associated to specific segments and accounts in the Hierarchy of Segments.

To allocate expenses, the application uses the following items, which comprise your cost model:

Bucket allocations

Allocation of a particular bucket to a segment or an account in a segment using allocation methods, using the rule to calculate the breakdown of the expense, either on an equal basis, manual, or weighted.

Segment rollups

Defines how the amount rolls up from one segment to another segment.

Rollup overrides

Amount from a particular account of a segment can roll up to any account or segment in the hierarchy.

Allocation metrics

Contain additional instructions that the application uses to allocate expenses based on a weighted calculation or on a script. A method can use one or more metrics.

When you use the workbench to assign expenses to accounts and segments, it creates all the rules, methods, and conditions automatically.

Users with the financial management administrator or financial analyst role can administer cost allocations through the workbench, which is the preferred method, or by using lists and forms.

Chargebacks

The application supports "chargebacks", or negative amounts in general ledger expenses that can be used to transfer credits between segments for a shared cost. Chargeback expenses process fixed amount methods in the opposite way of other expenses. For example, a fixed amount type method that allocates $50 on a $100 dollar chargeback, shown as "-100" in the general ledger expense, applies a $50 credit as specified by the rule.

Example Allocations

The demo data provided with the application provides good examples of different types of allocations. You can make several types of allocations, such as allocating:

• Storage costs based on consumption
• Private cloud costs based on usage of virtual machines
• Servers based on cost, CPUs, location, and so on
• Project management contract costs

• Account buckets
  Account buckets help you categorize cleansed expenses before you assign the expenses to accounts and segments.
• Grooming and cleansing conditions
  Grooming conditions define how expenses are related to each other and to buckets when you make changes in the workbench, while cleansing conditions define how financial data is cleansed by segment.
• Expense allocation
  Expense allocation refers to the assignment of expenses to accounts in the hierarchy of segments.
• Financial Management example allocations
  The demo data that is available with the Financial Management application provides examples of cost allocations that you can use to model allocation rules, methods, and metrics.
• Metric weight maps
  Weight maps are generated for each metric for every fiscal unit set in com.glide.fiscal_calendar.fiscal_unit property.
• Use cost analysis to view the allocation of amount
  Use cost analysis for a specific cost model for a fiscal period to view the cost lines using a UI similar to allocation workbench. Cost analysis helps you to view the bucket amount, the amount allocated to accounts, and the rolled up amount across segments and accounts based on the cost lines generated by the allocation engine.