Schedule to Budget rule

The Schedule to Budget rule is used to create schedules that spend the entire budget. When this rule is selected, the staff requirements are adjusted to match the location budget. The Schedule to Budget rule supports all budget types that are available for locations in LFSO.

When a schedule is created using the Schedule to Budget rule, the total hours in the staffing requirements are compared with the hours in the budget. When the budget is in dollar amounts, or other currency amounts, the budget is converted to hours based on an average of employees' hourly rates. The staff requirement hours are then increased or decreased to match the budget hours in a process known as Budget Adjusted Workload. Shifts are assigned in the schedule to cover the adjusted staff requirements with the goal of spending the entire budget.

For details on using this rule with dollar-based budgets, see Using Schedule to Budget with dollar amounts.

For example on a given week, the forecast for a store calls for 80 staff hours, and the store's budget is 120 hours. Without the Schedule to Budget rule, shifts would be assigned to cover the 80 hours required by the forecast. With the Schedule to Budget rule enabled, staff requirements would be increased to 120 hours. Assuming enough employees are available, the optimizer would assign 120 hours, or more, of shifts to cover the adjusted staff requirements.

Adjustments to staff requirements are done within the maximum and minimum staff levels configured for a location. Staff requirements cannot be increased beyond the maximum staff requirements when the budget is large. Similarly, staff requirements cannot be reduced below the minimum staff requirements. Changes in staff requirements are distributed proportionately across the schedule period.

Schedule to Budget creates schedules where the schedule cost equals or exceeds the budget amount. When this rule is used with the Maximum Schedule Budget rule configured as a hard constraint, schedules are ruled out if the schedule cost is above the budget amount. When Schedule to Budget is set as a hard constraint, schedule creation fails if the entire budget amount cannot be spent due to the configuration of other rules or lack of available employees.