Let’s Talk Hierarchy Set-up and Best Practices

The Home Tab Hierarchy is the foundation of budgeting and planning within Allocadia. The Hierarchy is a level based structure that consists of Folders, Sub-folders, and Activity Plans that allow for categorization of marketing spend and often reflects the marketing team's organizational structure.

The Hierarchy set up takes into consideration the following core factors:

• A geographic marketing organization splits operational and reporting duties across multiple locations. Each location is overseen and directed by one or several leaders who are responsible for the overall success of the marketing spend. Each marketer within the various geographic locations will manage marketing programs in their specific location. A geographic structure may keep currency considerations to a minimum. 

• A functional organization structure contains specialized units or marketing team that report to a single authority. Each functional unit handles one aspect of marketing such as Events, Demand Generation or Public Relations.

• Some organizations divide their spend according to product, business unit, brand, etc. The allocation based Hierarchy structure reflects the allocation of marketing funds across the marketing organization.

• Since marketing activities need to be reconciled with financial systems, many marketers classify their Activity Plans this way, however, often accounting codes tend to be broader than marketers prefer. For this reason, this type of Hierarchy structure is not the ideal.

Other Factors to Consider…

• Targets: We recommend that your set up follows the flow of target allocation dollars throughout your organization.
• One Target per Activity Plan: Ideally, you will have a target for every budget in your Hierarchy. By setting the target at the budget level, your users will be able to compare their aggregated marketing activities totals to their top-down target number.
• A Symmetrical Hierarchy: Allows for consistency in the folder structure and simplified target management. 
• Use Target Types: For Multi-Level Hierarchies target types allow you to report on targets without double counting targets.
• User Access: Allocadia is a permission-based application where users can only access folders, and Activity Plans that they have been invited to. As a general guideline, we’ve found that the best budget to user ratio is 1:1. 
• Reporting: Each level of your Hierarchy can be used as a filter in reporting so you can easily aggregate or view your data at more granular levels.
• Currency: Allocadia accommodates multi-currency hierarchies. Each organization will have one overall master currency per hierarchy. While individual Activities can be set to reflect, an alternate currency allowing your users to Plan and Forecast in their local currency. This functionality enables local currency inputs and a global master currency view for consistency and reporting.