Articles
Overview
Articles are a key concept in xpna and are used for creating and managing itemised bottom-up budgets. A Bottom-up planning approach is generally considered to be more accurate and less likely to be contentious to those who carry responsibility for the profit and loss attributed to the articles.
An "Article" can be thought of as a single item that has a one or more attributes that describe it. For example, an article may be an "employee" and have attributes such as "name", "salary", "FTE", "start date", "end date", etc. These articles in turn, can be used to create itemised budget or forecast records. In the employee example, a single employee could be used to create budget or forecast expenses for:
- salary
- superannuation
- FTE
- headcount
- workers compensation
- payroll tax
Other common article types might include:
- fixed assets
- contracts or projects
- opportunities
- subscriptions
Articles are grouped into "data sources", assigned to specific scenarios. These groupings are used to manage the list of articles, as well as filter your reports to see planning transactions relating to only that data source.
For information on how to create and manage articles, see: