The intention of usage period templates is, that the user does not have to enter all usage periods for each planning calibration, but instead can use templates. The templates stick to time axis. This means, that you can for example analyze the last four quarters, the last year, or the last three winters.
To create a new usage period template go to “Usage Period Templates” via the search function and then press “New”.
This opens a new Usage Period Template.
Explanation of the individual fields
| Name | Description |
| Code | Specifies the number of the entry or record involved according to the defined number series. |
| Description | Specifies a description for this template. |
| Starting Day | Specifies the starting day for this template. If the starting day, starting month, closing day, and closing month are left blank, the work date is used as the calculation basis. |
| Starting Month | Specifies the start month for this template If the starting day, starting month, closing day and closing month are left blank, the work date is used as the calculation basis. |
| Closing Day | Specifies the closing day for this template. If the starting day, starting month, closing day, and closing month are left blank, the work date is used as the calculation basis. |
| Closing Month | Specifies the closing month for this template. If the starting day, starting month, closing day, and closing month are left blank, the work date is used as the calculation basis. |
| No. of Periods | Specifies the number of periods to be calculated backwards. |
| Calculation Period | Specifies the date formula to be used for the calculation. Only “simple” date formulas such as 3W are permitted. A link such as 2M+2W is not possible. You could also interpret the field as the distance between eatch usage period. |
| Account Current Period | Specifies whether the current period should be included. If this is not desired, the first usage period is offset by exactly one period. However, the number of back-calculated periods remain the same. |
| Last Day | Specifies whether the period always ends with its last day as month have different day lengths. |
| Created at | Specifies when the template was created. This value is set automatically when the template is created. |
| Created by | Specifies the name of the user who created the template. This value is set automatically when the template is created. |
The result for the above example are the following usage periods:
The above example is based on the working date of 6 April 2020. As you can see, the first period calculated is not April 2020 but March 2020. This is due to the field “Account Current Period”. This ensures that the month of April is omitted, as this is the current period.
If the “Last day” field were not activated in this case, the periods would not always end exactly at the end of the month.