In SturppyPlus each variable has two different formulas, a live formula and a planning formula

Live formula

The live formulas is the formula that is directly tied to your live data, you should just link this formula to the datastore and not apply successive logic to it.

You can use the live formula to sum different datastore items, like summing individual expense items that should be grouped together for analysis purpose, but no additional logic.

Planning formula

The planning formula is used to do forecasting and projections. By default Sturppy uses AI to do forecasting on your variables by looking at your historical values which is perfect for things like expenses and will cover you 90% of the times, but if you want to override this behaviour and create custom planning formulas, then you can just write your own planning formula in the variable.

When you create a planning formula you need to think about the data that you want to use, let’s see an example:

Variable name: Revenue

Live formula: linked to a dataset

Planning formula:

IF_PAST( @Revenue , PLAN( PREV( @Revenue ) ) * 1.2)

This planning formula basically grows the revenue by 20% for each successive month, let’s break it down:

• IF_PAST: if the current period (the cell) is in the past, then take the first argument as a value, if not, meaning we are in the future, then take the second argument as a value
• PLAN: when referencing a variable with the @{variable}, by default we reference the live formula, if you want to explicitly reference the planning formula, then wrap the variable in the PLAN function
• PREV: take the previous month value
• 1.2: our growth factor

So, to recap, if it is the past, just take the value of @revenue, since we have the actual value, if we are planning for the future, then take the planning value of the previous month of @revenue and increase it by 20%.

Why do we need PLAN

We have to use the PLAN function, because we don’t have any values in the future for the live formula, so the PREV function, two months in the future, would be zero since there is no actual data for the previous month.

By using the PLAN function, we are going to have values even in the future since we can forecast and project those as we want.