With the support of
the Federal Research Centre
"Computer Science and Control" of
the Russian Academy of Sciences
"The more genius plan, the less people will agree with it"
Sun Tzu
COST PLANNING SERVICE
The widest area of the Service usage is the budgeting, although the Service allows to plan the supplies of any scarce resource flexibly and efficiently.
Income is a variable for millions of individuals and companies. It may depend on the volume of sales, market prices, exchange rates and many other factors. However, even on a state level, expenditures are often planned on the basis of point assumptions about the total income. If such assumptions are wrong, the budget is to be altered. The planning results are also presented by exact value for each expense item, although in practice most of the costs can not be predicted accurately.
To address these shortcomings, we have developed innovative computational methods and implemented them in the proposed Service. It has practical importance for:
businessmen and other persons interested in timely and dynamic cost planning
commercial companies
non-profit organizations involved in the planning of their resources
We do not offer one more accounting program, where planning is often understood as entering expected revenues and addition of expenses with monitoring of the balance.
We offer the progressive tool for distribution of expected resource amount between expense items, which drastically enhances efficiency and flexibility of planning.
In a client application of the Service you specify minimum amount of the resource as the sum of opening balance and expected income in the worst case scenario. You specify maximum amount of the resource as the sum of opening balance and expected income in the optimal scenario.
You specify a table of expense items, and for each row you can enter the lowest and the highest expected costs (or exact value) - the requests of the expense items.
You can specify weighting coefficients (priorities) of expense items and use them in computations. You can mark some requests as obligatory (e.g. mortgage payments or rents can rarely be reduced).
You command 'Allocate' from your client application. It connects to the Service via Internet and sends it a request for resource planning. The Service performs computations and sends results back to the client application, which shows them to you. The results contain values 'Allocate min.' and 'Allocate max.' for each expense item - the plan for the worst and the best scenarios. The application also displays values 'Allocate avg.' (so you can see the approximate distribution of the resource) and diagrams of average distribution and satisfaction of requests.
Sum of 'Allocate min.' values complies the specified minimum amount of the resource, and sum of 'Allocate max.' values complies the specified maximum. The values are based on the specified requests for resource and (optionally) the priorities of expense items.
In the course of the plan implementation, when you receive or spend a part of the resource, or obtain more precise information on expected income or costs, you input the corresponding data in your application, execute the command 'Allocate' again, and get the refined results.
If you specify the resource amount exactly (i.e. minimum = maximum) and execute the command 'Allocate', the received values 'Allocate max.' can be treated as exact decision of the cost planning task.
EFFICIENTLY. FLEXIBLY.
If you specify bounds for resource and requests cautiously and follow the plan prepared with the Service, you drastically reduce the probability of going beyond the budget.
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For each expense item you beforehand see the bounds for possible costs, and you narrow them in the course of the plan implementation.
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If upper bound is less than minimum request for some item, then you can timely attract investments, or exclude item, or correct other costs.
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If the planning results are too "tight", you can temporarily exclude any expense item from consideration: just put a "tick" in the corresponding cell of the table.
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You can simulate any real cost: set minimum request equal to maximum, mark it as obligatory, execute the command 'Allocate', and see the changes of bounds for the rest of expense items.
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You can manually adjust the planning results. The application will indicate if the entered data is inconsistent.
ANY RESOURCE. APPLICABLE PRECISION.
You can specify any name and units of measure for your resource (USD, thousand euro; tonnes, etc.), and the applied precision for planning. The applied precision is the minimum significant resource amount for the specified units of measure: from 0.0001 to 1 billion. All the data will be rounded to that number. Computation results are rounded with a special algorithm, keeping the right sum, taking into account the requests and priorities. This allows, in particular, to solve the integer problems.
ANY NUMBER OF DETAIL LEVELS.
You can create a separate table of details for each expense item. Amount of the resource allocated to the expense item will be distributed between expense items that form its details.
The number of detail levels is not limited, so you can define a hierarchy of resource consumption. For each table of expense items, you can set its own flag 'Use weighting coef.' and data precision. The 'Allocate' command may be executed for the entire hierarchy or a part of it.
COMPREHENSIVE EXAMPLES.
Two examples of the cost planning tasks will be installed on your workplace with client application: business.cpw and family.cpw. You can use them as data sources for your own tasks. The example for small business is used in the video presentation.
FRIENDLY INTERFACE.
Client applications provide a familiar interface for work with spreadsheets of expense items.
Calculations results, erroneous and illogical data are highlighted in color (green, red, blue).
You can specify calendar periods as expense items: the convenient interface is provided.
Each planning task is stored in a separate file, so you can copy it from one workplace to another. In one task, you can plan allocation of several separate resources.
You can copy/paste data between different tables of Cost Planning tasks and Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Calc, LibreOffice Calc and other spreadsheets. Special import/export operations are provided for files in MS Excel format (XLS, XLSX).
DATA CONFIDENTIALITY.
Requests from client application to the Service contain only numbers: names of resources, measure units, expense items are not needed for the calculations, so they are not transmitted through the Internet. The Service just performs calculations, sends the results, and terminates connection. All data of your tasks are stored on your side only. The server stores only registration data of your workplaces.
(see the Privacy Policy)
The basic ideas of algorithm belong to Professor Vladimir D. Ilyin. Alexander V. Ilyin has developed the modified algorithm and described it and the suggested Service in the paper "Method of cost planning and its implementation in online service" which was published in 2014.
If you want to see several screenshots of the client application (resource specification dialog, general view, execution and result of the command 'Allocate', entering actual cost), please follow this link. The screenshots were made using the example of planning costs for a small business (data is random).
Download installer of the client application (version 1.2)
(the installers are digitally signed, please ignore possible warnings from your browser)
(the request is execution of the command 'Allocate')
21 days from the date of registration on the first device - FREE ACCESS to the Service from two of your devices with a maximum of 200 requests
After the free trial period, you can make payments on subscription basis using the 'My Account' page - only for the periods in which you will actually use the Service
Prices for individuals (including support and all application updates)
Prices of versions adapted for organizations
(including support and all application updates)
If you want to use the Service in your own client application, please contact us. We can discuss the terms of agreement, which will allow you to use a simple communication protocol of the Service.
For corporate customers it is possible to develop a multi user version of client application which will use a corporate database management system.
Copyright © 2013-2018 Alexander V. Ilyin, Russia, Individual Entrepreneur's State Registration Number 306770000015343. All rights reserved.
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