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User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
Budgets
In Unica Plan, a budget coordinates expenses of plans, programs, and projects. After you establish the plan budget, you can fund linked programs, and ultimately projects, from it. Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects in the form of allocations, forecasted or committed spending, and actual expenses.
Budget finding
Although you can plan your budget by using either top-down or bottom-up methods, the flow of actual money travels down the linked plan, program, project hierarchy. Regardless of how you plan your expenses, plans fund programs, which fund projects, which in turn fund any child or subprojects.

User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Introduction
  Unica Plan is a tool for enterprise planning, collaboration, and workflow that provides a complete solution for the needs of marketers. You can use Unica Plan to get a comprehensive and holistic view of all marketing projects across your company.
- Common tasks
- Plans
  Plans capture the objectives of a business unit or geographic area for a specific timeframe, such as a year or a quarter. A plan is the container for your marketing programs and projects.
- Programs
  Programs are the child-objects of Plans. Programs can contain multiple projects to organize work for your organization.
- Projects
  A project organizes all the information that is related to develop and run one or more related marketing initiatives. Projects contain general information, resources, and attachments for the marketing initiative. Projects also typically organize the people who work on the marketing initiative, including who completes which tasks, and the timeline to complete the tasks. Projects can also include budget information. Monitoring features ensure that everyone knows whether the project is completed on time.
- Workflows
  To help you complete different workflow-related efforts, the Workflow tab offers different view modes and an edit mode.
- Approvals
  An approval process streamlines the process of having your work reviewed and approved. Multiple users can review work in parallel or in an order that represents your business processes.
- People and teams
  In Unica Plan, you assign work to teams or individual users.
- Calendar
  Historically, organizations produced paper-based calendars and updated them with the latest information. The calendar feature provides marketing groups with electronic means to view and update calendar data.
- Grids
  A grid is a spreadsheet-like presentation of data. Grids allow Unica Plan users to store all campaign- and project-related data within the project.
- Marketing objects
  A marketing object is any work product a team develops and reuses in the course of its marketing activities. Marketing objects can represent physical items (such as a letter or banner ad) or a business component (such as a credit card offer, a target segment definition, or a rewards program definition).
- Assets and asset libraries
  Unica Plan provides centralized management, secure storage, and web-based access for digital assets.
- Budgets
  In Unica Plan, a budget coordinates expenses of plans, programs, and projects. After you establish the plan budget, you can fund linked programs, and ultimately projects, from it. Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects in the form of allocations, forecasted or committed spending, and actual expenses.
  - Budget finding
    Although you can plan your budget by using either top-down or bottom-up methods, the flow of actual money travels down the linked plan, program, project hierarchy. Regardless of how you plan your expenses, plans fund programs, which fund projects, which in turn fund any child or subprojects.
    - Planning budgets from the top down
      Top-down planning is useful if a plan has predictable expenses from year to year.
    - Planning budgets from the bottom up
      Bottom-up budget funding is useful if you are not sure how much funding to allocate from the plan to the child objects but can forecast line items for programs and projects. After you predict all project expenses, you can roll them up to parent programs and plans.
  - Effects of deleting links between plans, programs, and projects
    When you remove links between plans, programs, and projects, the budgets of both parent and child objects are affected.
  - Budgets and accounts
    In Unica Plan, budgets and accounts do not have predetermined relationships. Accounts represent the financial element of an organization, while budgets represent the marketing side.
  - Budget views
    There are two budget views on all budget tabs.
  - The Plan Budget tab
    The Plan Budget tab displays information about the entire budget and allocations to child programs.
  - The Program Budget tab
    The Program Budget tab is similar to the Plan Budget tab but is one level down in the plan, program, project hierarchy. While the Plan Budget tab breaks down into information about linked programs, the Program Budget tab breaks down to information about linked projects. The Program Budget tab also contains an additional table about the program's line items.
  - The Project Budget tab
    The Project Budget tab has the same tables, layout, and information as the Program Budget tab but is one level lower in the hierarchy. While the Program Budget tab breaks down into information about linked projects, the Project Budget tab breaks down to information about any subprojects.
  - Budget allocation versions
    Budget allocation versions are a powerful tool for financial planning. You can use budget allocation versions to explore different financial possibilities without overwriting the previous budget. You can create multiple budget versions with different allocations for expenses, compare versions, and then chose the most appropriate one for the plan, program, or project.
  - Allocating funds
    A parent plan, program, or project allocates funds down to individual child programs and projects that are contained within it. Plans fund programs, programs fund projects, and projects fund subprojects.
  - Allocating funds for stand-alone programs and projects
    A stand-alone program or project is not linked to a parent plan. When you create a budget for a stand-alone program, the budget reflects costs that are associated with the program and any costs that are associated with any projects that are linked to the program.
  - Adding and editing line items
    Line items outline the forecasted and committed costs for a program, project, or subproject so a manager knows whether the allocated or planned budget is sufficient. Additionally, forecasted and committed amounts, after they are finalized, are rolled up to the accounts affected, providing visibility into budget and cash flow needs for higher-level objects.
  - Budget line item approvals
    Depending on the rule criteria that your administrator established in the project and program templates, budget line items might be automatically approved or sent through the Unica Plan approval process.
- Invoices
  In Unica Plan, you can view all changes that were made to an invoice, including the time and date of the changes and the type of changes made.
- Accounts
  A top-level Unica Plan account represents a corporate account that is established by a finance department for tracking and controlling expenditures and cash flows for specific areas of the business. Accounts can have subaccounts.
- Metrics
  Metrics are used for management reports and analysis. View metrics on the Tracking tab for plans, programs, and projects.
- Reports
  By default, Unica Plan provides a set of predefined reports and dashboard components. The Unica Plan reports package provides additional example reports and dashboard report components that are created in IBM® Cognos®, a separate business intelligence application.
- Searches
  You can perform simple and advanced searches in Unica Plan.
- Alerts and the message board
  You can use alerts and the message board both to communicate information to other users of Unica Plan. Alerts and the message board are available for plans, programs, projects, requests, assets, accounts, approvals, invoices, tasks, teams, and marketing objects.
- Reading a message on the message board
  You can read messages that were previously posted to the message board, if you have permission to view that object. Messages can be posted for plans, programs, projects, assets, accounts, approvals, or invoices.
- Checklists and To-dos
  Checklists are independent of other features of Plan and you can use checklists to maintain lists of to-dos for yourself or any other user.

Budget funding

Although you can plan your budget by using either top-down or bottom-up methods, the flow of actual money travels down the linked plan, program, project hierarchy. Regardless of how you plan your expenses, plans fund programs, which fund projects, which in turn fund any child or subprojects.

Hierarchy of a plan to programs to projects and subprojects image

For more information about budget planning, see Planning budgets from the top down and Planning budgets from the bottom up.

Note: Since stand-alone programs and projects are not linked to plans, they have their own budgets that you enter directly on their respective budget tabs.

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