Allocation Plan

Overview

The Allocation Plan brings together Income Templates, allowing them to be viewed and edited side by side. This allows you to see how all of your income is allocated over the course of the month (or any other time-frame). You might get paid twice a month and your spouse may get paid once. You could create Templates for each income source and edit them side by side in the Allocation Plan.

Adding and Creating Income Templates

Press the plus sign to add an existing Template, or to create a new one.

Type: is usually "Regular Multiple".

Name: A unique name to identify the Template.

Amount: Optional total amount of income source. You will edit this in the Allocation Plan.

Frequency: How often you receive the income: once a week, once a month, once every two weeks, etc. Important note: Receiving income twice a month is not the same thing as receiving it every two weeks.

Creating, Adding and Editing Envelopes

To add an Envelope from the Allocation Plan, you can simply enter a new name on a blank line, if the Envelope already exists but is not currently included in the Allocation Plan, it will now be included. If the Envelope does not exist, it will be added to the system. If you edit an existing Envelope name, Principal Plan will not change the existing Envelope's name it will either create a new Envelope, or it will begin including the existing Envelope with the new name.

Changing the View Mode

You can change the view mode in the Allocation Plan to see how your plan looks based on different time spans. This will change the values based on the Templates' actual frequency. For instance, if you have an annual income source and view it on a monthly basis, the values will be divided by 12. If you edit those values, you may see the following warning:

The Warning: "The amount you entered will be altered slightly because the frequency of the income source doesn't fit perfectly with the current frequency of the Allocation Plan."

So, if you have a monthly income Template and you're editing it while viewing the Allocation Plan by year, the amount you enter will be divided by 12 and this may cause some rounding.

Warning! If you hate math, don't look at the next part.

Here's an example of rounding:

Situation: you are editing a value under a monthly Template while viewing the Allocation Plan by Year. You enter 1.99, and Principal Plan changes the value to 2.04, here's why:

1.99 / 12 = 0.1658333 -> rounds to 0.17 -> x 12 for annual = 2.04.

Closing and Saving the Allocation Plan

Press the OK button to save the Allocation Plan. If you Cancel, your changes will be discarded.