The campaign catalog#

A campaign is a job whose destination is data collection: instead of emailing output, it generates input forms, assigns them to people, collects their numbers, and writes the results back to the planning model.

Timberline carries one, and it exercises nearly every contribution capability at once.

Segment & Channel Budget Input: the full cycle#

The reference campaign. It exercises nearly every contribution capability at once: form generation, assignment, validation, approvals, notifications, and write-back to two different cubes.

Three forms, one per market, USA - East, USA - Central and Southeast Asia, generated from Timberline_Budget_Input_Model.xlsx and named from the market value. The year comes from the Current Year global parameter, so the whole campaign re-points to a new plan year with one change.

The form has three sheets:

• Budget Entry: the input grid. Twenty-four input cells across product lines and channels, each validated so a non-numeric entry is rejected with "Not a number". Volume, price/mix and variable-cost drivers on one binding; five row-blocks bound to the plan model.
• Fixed Costs: a smaller input block on its own model.
• Summary: a read-only contribution-margin waterfall that recalculates as the contributor types.

Who is assigned:

Note the shape rather than the names: contributors sit in the region that owns the number, and one approver covers more than one form.

Options in force: approvals required, approvers may edit forms, export/import enabled, exported workbooks hide the non-print area and lock non-input cells, invitations sent from a nominated sender address.

Ten automation tasks: invitations on a daily clock, reminders armed, workflow notifications on form status change, two cube exports, and a stop/archive pair held disabled.

Read this one when you care about planning cycles, governance and approvals, or getting numbers back into the model.

What contribution campaigns are for#

The problem they solve, stated plainly:

You need to collect data from people who are not necessarily licensed in your system once a quarter or year, and need a platform to take care of that process for you.

The load-bearing phrase is not necessarily licensed in your system. The pitch is not the form. It is reaching contributors who have no seat in the planning tool, and running the collection process around them.

Real-world cases this shape covers, drawn from finance teams who have run it:

• Weekly forecast collection from market presidents. A short-cycle, recurring collection from senior people who would never log into the planning system.
• Annual sales planning templates. Once a year, distributed wide.
• Across both, the dominant purpose was forecasting.

That is the frame to put around the Budget Input campaign: it is a cadence of collection from unlicensed contributors, not merely a budget form.

Where to look#

The round trip, end to end#

Worth walking end to end:

1. As an administrator, open Segment & Channel Budget Input and look at the three generated forms and who they are assigned to.
2. Switch to the seat of a contributor on one of the market forms. They land straight on their input form. Type a value, then type a letter and watch the validation reject it. Submit. (See Signing in, and who to be for how the demo's seats work.)
3. Switch to that form's approver. Review, edit if you like (this campaign allows it), approve.
4. Back as the administrator, run the Plan1 export and watch the numbers land in the THC_Sales cube.
5. Open a report that reads that cube and show the new plan numbers.

That last step is the one people remember: the number they typed shows up in the board pack.

Related#

• Build a campaign · Update an input form · Export campaign data