Budgets

Setting a personal target or goal is an effective way to create engagement. This feature allows the users to set a weekly and/or monthly budget in energy or cost and to track towards it. The Eliq platform will notify if the budget has been reached or surpassed and as well as warn if it is forecasted to miss giving the energy user a chance to react and adapt. This feature adds to the long-lasting engagement and encourages the user to revisit the app when they receive a notification and to keep adjusting their budget for upcoming periods.

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How does it work?

The energy user can create, edit and delete a weekly and/or monthly budget. If the location has cost available, through a Price Formula, then a budget can be set for cost. It can always be create for energy (Whs). A budget can be created for each individual fuel that is available allowing the energy user to choose what they would like to focus on and set a budget for. There can only be one weekly budget and one monthly budget per location and fuel at the same time. The budget always follows full calendar weeks and months. It can also support weeks starting beginning on Sundays or Mondays.

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How does it work under the hood?

A Budget is created per Location by the energy users through the Update location budget endpoint and is either enabled or not. A limit for what they budget should be set to is posted along with which unit.

For each enabled budget a daily service will update the status of each budget and trigger potential events that can be sent to as notifications to the energy user through web hooks.

The date of the last received data specifies the current budget period. If for example, the current date is 3rd June and the date of the last data received is 30th May, the current monthly budget period is May.

The budget runs every time a new datapoint is added and processed in the platform, which means it always stays up to date.

The endpoints also provides a suggested budget limit to the energy user to make it easy to set the first budget.

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API

• Get location budgets Returns a list of available budgets and the corresponding status.
• Update location budget Updates a locations budget by providing fuel, resolution and unit. The limit can be changed and the budget can be enabled or disabled.

PUT /v3/locations/{locationId}/budgets?fuel=elec&unit=energy&resolution=month

{
  "enabled": true,
  "mode": "auto",
  "margin_percent": 10
}

GET /v3/locations/{locationId}/budgets/history?fuel=elec&unit=energy&resolution=month

{
  "fuel": "elec",
  "unit": "energy",
  "resolution": "month",
  "from": "2020-01-01T00:00:00",
  "to": "2020-04-01T00:00:00",
  "limit": [200000, 200000, 180000],
  "consumption": [187500, 213000, 165200]
}

Supported fuel types

A budget can be set for each fuel that is available in the Location, this includes Electricity, Gas, District Heating. Individual budgets will be set up in the platform.

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Supported Location Profile Types

Budgets can be created for both Residential and Business Locations. For more information about Location Profile Types, please visit the Location Profile article

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Available resolutions

Create a budget requires daily resolution of higher.

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Required data

There is no requirement to have any historic data to create a budget. Depending on when data is added to the Location, budgets can

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Webhook

Eliq sends a budget_weekly or budget_monthly notification when the limit is passed, when the budget period ends, and when the forecast shows the budget will go over the limit. The payload is the same for all three: read status.result to tell them apart (above, completed_below or forecasted_above).

Read more about Web Hooks here.

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Use Cases

This feature allows users to set a weekly or monthly budget for energy usage or cost. It helps the energy user track their energy consumption and get notified if usage exceeds the set limits. Notifications are sent when the limit is exceeded, when the budget period finishes, and when the forecast shows the limit will be exceeded. This feature promotes long-term engagement and encourages the user to revisit the app when they receive a notification.

Create a budget

Allow the user to create a weekly or monthly budget by selecting a budget period and setting a target goal. To help the user set a target, the forecast is shown on the screen and a suggestion that is around 10% below the forecast can be shown.

Edit a budget

Allow an energy user to edit a budget at any time to adjust the target goal.

Track budget

On the Budget Screen, the energy user can see the set budget, consumption so far for an ongoing week as well as the forecasted end result. To compare the set budget, the user can navigate to previous weeks to understand how the set budget compares with previous periods and if it consistently is over or under.

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Budget notifications

Notifications to remind, engage and encourage users to set and reach their goals are available:

• End of budget period result: includes encouragement to set a new budget for the next period.
• Forecast exceeding budget alert: a heads-up during the period that the forecast will go over the set goal. Sent at most once per period, once the period has 7 days of data (monthly) or 3 days (weekly), and never after one of the other two notifications. Eliq turns it on for each client.
• Budget exceeded: tells the energy user that consumption for the budget period has gone over the set goal.

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