At Jirav, our goal is to simplify financial planning and execution by helping you understand where your business has been and predict where it is going. Today we are excited to talk about Custom Lines, a feature that opens up Jirav models to a new level of sophistication.
Custom Lines
The Jirav financial model is flexible enough to allow any line in the model to drive any other line in the model. This means that any line from your Accounting data, your Payroll data and your Sales data can be used to drive any future parts of the model. In practice, often there are other external assumptions that are key drivers of costs and/or revenue for a model. Jirav's Custom Lines now support the ability to work with such external assumptions. Let's use "Bananas" 🍌 to understand how the feature works 😀
Let's say that for some reason we want to keep track of a count of bananas in our model. They don't exist in our Financial, HR or Sales data so they are a custom line in the model.
We start by first creating a custom line called "Bananas". We assign the "#" format and since this is a running total, they should be treated as a "Balance" value when aggregated.
Using a Custom driver, we now assume 5 new Bananas for every new S&M hire in the model. So each new S&M employee gets 5 bananas each! We can review the output values here and also add more drivers or manual adjustments to Bananas as needed. This line can now be used to drive other parts of the model.
We head back over to Drivers and assume 2 new Smoothies Bookings for each Banana in the model. We also assume $0.5 in COGS for every Banana in the model. This way Bananas become first-class items in Jirav. They can be used in every single place where any other lines from the model can be used. They can both be driven by other things, as well as can be used to drive other things.
Custom Lines are a very fundamental extension to the Jirav model. Coupled with the already existing functionality, they enable us to create models that are extremely sophisticated. All of this, while keeping assumptions in one place, and being transparent enough for anyone else to understand exactly how things work.
What Do You Think? Let Us Know.
We’re passionate about what we’re building which is why we want to hear from you. We welcome your feedback in helping Jirav continue to be the most intuitive, sophisticated FP&A tool, designed for speed with an it-just-works philosophy. Let us know what you think and we look forward to keeping in touch.
