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 total hours in the staff requirements are compared with the location budget. The staff requirements are increased or decreased to match the budget. The staff requirement adjustment process is 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 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.