Timings

Setting up Model Timings

Overview

Each Model performs its calculations over a period of time that you define, whether that be 5 days, or 20 years. Every Variable in the Model will have a value for each separate time interval in the model.

You can choose:

1. The Interval Type of the model (Days, Months, Years...)

2. The Start/End/Duration of the model

3. The Fiscal Year End

Interval Type

Models offers 5 interval types: Day; Week; Month; Quarter; Year

This determines the length of an individual period of the Model.

Individual Model periods are always consecutive, and of the length of 1 interval. e.g. if the first period of a Model is a Week, ending on Friday 6th January 2023, the second period will be the week ending Friday 13th January 2023.

Start/End/Duration

You must define the beginning and end of your Model Timings, which you can do by setting any 2 of:

1. Start date

2. Duration (in number of intervals)

3. End date

Setting any 2 of these will automatically update the third.

There is no defined limit to the number of intervals to use in your Model, but be aware using a large number of intervals (e.g. >100) may cause performance issues, depending on Model complexity.

Start/End dates are entered as text, with the format determined by the selected Interval Type, as shown in the example image and table below.

Start/End date entry

Start/End Date text formats

Interval Type	Text Format	Notes
Day	yyyyMMdd	Year/Month/Day
Week	yyyyMMdd	Refers to the 7-day period ending at the entered date
Month	yyyyMM	Year/Month. Precise date will depend on Fiscal Year End settings.
Quarter (Option 1)	yyyyQ[1-4]	Precise date will depend on Fiscal Year End settings. e.g. 2020Q4 refers to the last quarter of the 2020 fiscal year. If Fiscal Year End is set to March (End of Month), the precise date will be 31st March 2020.
Quarter (Option 2)	yyyyMM	Precise date will depend on Fiscal Year End settings. e.g. 202003 refers to March 2020. If Fiscal Year End is set to March (End of Month), this will be equivalent to 2020Q4 (31st March 2020). A quarter entered in this format must be a valid quarter end month.
Year	yyyy	Precise date will depend on Fiscal Year End settings.

Fiscal Year End

The Fiscal Year End (FYE) is how a business defines the end of its operating year, for accounting purposes.

e.g. a company's FYE might be 31st March, meaning that its company accounts will cover the period from 1st April one year to 31st March the next.

In the vast majority of instances, the FYE is at the end of the month (e.g. 31st Dec, 28th/29th February, 31st March). However, Models allows you to define an FYE at a specific day in a month (from 1-31). If a quarter ends in a month that has fewer days than the day specified, the end of that month will be used.

Not all Models will be financial in nature, but you can still use the FYE to define when your intervals end.

e.g. if you want a yearly model that starts on March 5th every year, you would set the FYE as shown in the image below.

Fiscal Year End entry