Thank you Jim, I've updated the article with your recommended change.

Hi, does this formula handle allocation if there are negative cost in the driver?

Thank you for the post

Hi Bård,

I'm pleased to see you finally got this working! Thanks to Jesper and Kelly for the tips.

I believe there are plans to make a "weight by driver" allocation option in the product - so hopefully we won't have to battle with these formulas in the long term.

Ohoi Kelly and Jesper,

Thank for your help! For others who might run into the same problems...It's working finally with the following configuration: 
Indirect allocation line from ITRT to Staging object:

Staging object is based in the existing ITRT table and the same object identifier as in ITRT:

Allocation from Staging object to Business services using an existing allocation line in the formula:

With formula:
=SOURCE * {Direct to Business Services (Cost driver) }/~{Direct to Business Services (Cost driver) }

Used Jesper's technique of getting the name of the Cost driver by going into the legacy modeler. And yes, spacing was muy importate. Thanks.. y'all  

Bard -

Jesper is correct - spacing is extremely touchy when you use the cost drivers in any formula.

Follow Jesper's advice on finding the correct cost driver name in the legacy modeler - copy and paste it within the formula so that the spacing is correct.

I have been known to keep a lot of my formulas, especially the tough one, in notepad so that I can make copies and modify if needed for another formula.  Much easier than reinventing the wheel each time something comes up, plus it is easier to find them.

Hi Bård

Spaces in this function are important, so remember to ensure you have the correct spaces when you copy this formula. Remember you also can name the different allocation lines to ensure you have the right name when applying this formula.

It also looks like your names of the allocation lines are not correct. I would expect the line to end with (Cost driver).

You can always go into the legacy modeler and find the name of the line by adding a column and filter for (cost driver).

Thanks Kelly!

Do you know how i would reference the Direct allocation line in the formula. It has the following name in model:

So the (Business Services) by ServiceID is the direct one.

My apptio training is years old unfortunatly so excuses in adance, but I tried something like:

=SOURCE*{(Business Services) by ServiceID(Cost)}/~{(Business Services) by ServiceID(Cost)}

that does not work:

nothing is allocating further up to Business Services from my staging object.

I use several of these allocations within my model.

Looking at your formula this is what I see could be the issue

=SOURCE * {IT Resource Tower Unallocated(Cost)}/~{IT Resource Tower Unallocated(Cost) }

SOURCE is the IT Resource Tower Unallocated in your instance - that is what you are working on allocating to the Business Services

{direct allocated costs (Cost driver)}/~{direct allocated costs (Cost driver)}  with direct allocated costs representing the allocation line that you have going from IT Resource Towers to Business Services.

Hi Jim, 

Maybe you can help me out with my scenario. From the IT Resource tower object I have two allocation lines to Business Services. One that is direct allocated with Service ID key and one that is indirect where we spread the remaining cost evenly over all the business services. In my scenario the indirect allocation currently look like this:

 

The client would like to change the indirect allocation so that:

The indirect allocation is 'weighted by' the % of the total cost the particular business services already recieves from the direct allocation. In simpler terms they want the remaining cost from ITRT to be spread over the business services acoording to their size. A business services that makes up a larger size of the total direct cost should recieve more of the indirect cost.

Now I've been given advice that this might be solved by an allocation like #2 in this article. I have the following questions:
1. In my staging object (EG. IT Resource Tower Unallocated Collection). What should the table behind this object consist of?

2. I'm trying to figure out the formula to put into the allocation from IT Resource Tower Unallocated Collection to Business Services, what I'm I doing wrong in this one:
=SOURCE * {IT Resource Tower Unallocated(Cost)}/~{IT Resource Tower Unallocated(Cost) }

I'm sending the default metric 'Cost'. Somehow I also have to calculate the actual %-number i want to allocate with in this formula.

Any help is appriciated!

Useful link if you were like me in trying to understand what SOURCE and ~ meant in the above formulas.


....Use the Formula option to enter a custom formula to control the allocation. This formula will run on the table that receives money from the allocation. The formula has two special concepts not used by other formulas within Apptio: These concepts are "SOURCE" keyword and the "~" operation.

Formula allocations 

Having battled with one of these allocations I believe the formula should be updated as it is really based on the driver name, not the object name:

So:

=SOURCE * {Sending Object 1 (Cost driver) }/~{Sending Object 1 (Cost driver) }

Should be:

=SOURCE * {Sending Driver 1 (Cost driver) }/~{Sending Driver 1 (Cost driver) }

(NB "Cost" should be replaced with the name of the appropriate model metric)

The default driver names match the object name, but when there are multiple allocations they will have _1, _2 etc. appended - and they can also be renamed in the model to be more meaningful.

You're right, since v12 is still so new, there could still be gotchas that we are not aware of. Thanks for calling that out.

There is a potential issue regarding #2 in R12 where we had a similar scenario with USAA where we wanted to weight our Indirect Services Allocation by the Direct Service Driver. We tried sending two allocations to the same object from the same object and it had serious consequences with calculations and deadlocked the system. We also tried a version of the staging object but I'm not completely sure it was as clean as the example listed above. Does anyone know if weighting by a driver from one destination to another singular destination has calculation issues in R12?

Thank you for posting this. It is very good to know this feature is still available to us in R12!