The budget variance view shows how your actual costs compare to your projected costs, and why. Use it to explain cost overruns to management, track accruals for accounting close, or validate your budget assumptions. You can aggregate budget figures at the meter, building, or region level.
Note: Budget variance requires personalized setup in every account. If you’d like to use it, please email support@gridium.com.
Uploading budget data
To use budget variance features, Gridium needs your projected costs and energy use. Budgets can be assigned to either meters or buildings, but not both. For each calendar month, Gridium needs the full dollar amount you expect to spend per commodity (electricity and/or gas). For full functionality, budget data should also include how much use (kWh or therms) you expect for each month.
Once your data is ready, there are two ways to load it:
- Format your data in the Budget Forecasting Excel spreadsheet and upload it via the Upload budget periods button under the budget variance cost tab (shown below).
- Work with your customer success representative to format and upload your data.
You can also load budget data for historical periods for reference purposes.
Understanding budget variances
Gridium’s variance features help you understand why your actual costs deviated from budget. Here’s a simple example:
This building was under budget in October and December, but over budget by about $8.5K in November. Why?
The variance table breaks the total variance into two mutually exclusive sources:
- Price variance: Changes to your costs due to how much you paid per unit of energy.
- Quantity variance: Changes to your costs from shifts in energy use. Unexpected weather, occupancy changes, operational shifts, or equipment issues would all show up here.
Looking at the November columns, we can see that the building paid less for electricity than expected, but also consumed more electricity; the net effect was an over-budget month.
Clicking the month link for November drills down into the variance drivers:
The drilldown provides additional context for the price and quantity variance figures:
- In the price category, the blended rate decreased year over year, and good demand management reduced the peak demand for the period. Both helped control costs.
- In the use category, operational use was down, but weather-driven use and baseload were both elevated compared to last year. Weather is somewhat outside the building operator’s control, but baseload reduction may be one avenue to staying on budget in the future.
Variance charts
The budget variance home screen has several tools for exploring and visualizing your data. The time window selector at the top lets you choose a period and filter by commodity.
The charts make trends easier to spot:
- Budget vs. actual: Tracks your budgeted and actual costs over the year. When the lines diverge, you can see exactly when you started trending over or under budget.
- Variance by month: A bar chart showing the dollar variance for each month, making it easy to identify which months are driving the most variance.
At the region or building group level, the Variance by building chart lets you identify which buildings are contributing the most to overall budget variance.
