Categories, Sub-Categories, and Line Items

The hierarchy on the Investment tab represents our investment plan structure.

The line items represent the marketing investments and you can enter cost or spend data only for line items. To keep the overview, you structure the line items by categories and sub-categories.

Clicking the Category button inserts a folder on the top level. Clicking the Sub-category button adds a folder on the subordinate level of the marked row. The marked row is highlighted by the light purple shade. This allows sub-categories to be nested depending on how granular you are in organizing your marketing spend data.
Line items can be entered at any level.

Best Practice

Be creative and organize your spend in a way that is intuitive to you by grouping like marketing investments (individual's investment plans do not impact the types of reports that can be run from Uptempo, we arrange that separately from the investment plan organization).

Using a placeholder allows you to plan at a high-level and track costs at a granular level when forecast amounts are unknown. A placeholder is generally used during the planning phase and holds funds for future spend. It is used when the specific marketing investments have not yet been determined, but funds need to be reserved in the overall allocation.

For example, when planning to attend a tradeshow you may have an estimated budget of $100,000 but may not specifically know how that money will be spent until further planning is done to determine individual investments at the tradeshow. To hold the funds in the budget you would add $100,000 in the Plan column of a placeholder for the month or quarter the tradeshow will take place.

In Spend, the Grand Total row contains aggregate totals of the investments in your investment plans for each column. It allows you to track total spend data according to your organization’s configured columns.

The Grand Total row is the grey row at the top of your investment plans and is a total of the values of your marketing investments added up to a specific column.

Note

The Grand Total row also applies to folders and sub-folders, as well as investments. Any values in the folders or sub-folders aggregate at the Grand Total row and allow you to view your total spend for the month, quarter or fiscal year.

When you are viewing the investments hierarchy, investment items that are connected to activities have visual indicators to help you identify them at a glance:

  • If an investment item (category, sub-category, or line item) is connected to an activity, its table row is highlighted in yellow (categories are displayed in a slightly darker shade than sub-categories and line items):

  • Additionally, special icons are displayed beside the names of connected investment items (replacing the standard category, sub-category, and line items icons) to indicate the connection and the allocation type:

    • If an investment item is connected to one activity and is using automatic allocation, the Connected (Automatic Allocation) icon is displayed:

    • If an investment item is connected to one or multiple activities and is using manual allocation, the Connected (Manual Allocation) icon is displayed:

Note: 

The yellow highlighting only appears when a category, sub-category, or line item is directly connected to an activity itself.

Line items can also be "indirectly" connected to an activity if they belong to a category or sub-category that is connected to an activity: these child line items are not directly connected to the activity themselves, but inherit the connection from their parent category or sub-category. This is because categories and sub-categories are not associated with funds themselves, so the line items within them are actually funding any activity that the category or sub-category is connected to.

In cases where child line items are indirectly connected through their parentitem, only the parent item's row is highlighted in yellow, while the rows for the child line items (and any sub-categories under the parent) are not. However, the child line items still display the Connected (Automatic Allocation) icon to signify that they are funding the activity connected to their (highlighted) parent:

With the button above the table you can add, delete or move items of your investment plan or export the plan data. For more information see the following topics:

Back to overview