FAQ

First of all, remember that Metrix is limited to only 244 rows in any of its registers. That means if you enter daily numbers in a variable, you won't have enough data for even one year.

The next option is usually monthly data. You can count up the number of days of occupancy per month, and use that as a variable. That works ok, but there is a better way. First, I should explain why it doesn't work great. Suppose you had the following school calendar:

1/2 holiday

2/15 holiday

4/16-4/30 spring break

5/17 holiday

6/20 - 9/2 summer break

Then you might enter the following number of school days in your variable (remember there are about 9 weekend days/month, which leaves about 21 school days/month):

1/31 20

2/28 18

3/31 21

4/30 10

5/31 20

6/30 14

7/31 0

8/31 0

and suppose your bills always fell on the 15th of the month.

For the April 15th bill, which covers 3/16-4/15, Metrix would assume that there was 15.839 school days/month, which is not true since there were no holidays during this period. There should be about 21 school days for this month. Here is how Metrix would calculate school days for this bill:

For the 3/16 - 4/15 bill, there are 16 days in March and 15 days in April. So Metrix will take 16/31 of the March variable number (21) and 15/30 of the April variable number (10) ... 16/31 * 21 + 15/30 * 10 = 15.839 school days for the bill. This is called prorating.

For this reason, typing in variables in monthly increments is not the best way to do it.

For this reason, then, some Metrix users will enter occupancy variables based upon bill date. If you had entered the variable amounts using the actual bill dates for this meter, then Metrix wouldn't prorate the numbers, and you would have found the right number of school days for the April bill, which was 21.

However if you have several meters, each with different read dates, then you would have to calculate occupancy data differently for each meter with different read dates. Most people don't want to do this, so instead they enter in the variable data based upon when the holidays occur. See how I do it below:

School Calendar

1/2 holiday

2/15 holiday

4/16-4/30 spring break

5/17 holiday

6/20 - 9/2 summer break

Variable Entries

1/2 0

2/14 28

2/15 0

4/15 40

4/30 0

5/16 11

5/17 0

6/19 22

9/2 0

What I did above was count the number of school days between holidays, and then the number of school days during the holidays. If you enter your occupancy data in this format, you avoid using too many rows, you can work with any number of different bill dates, and you avoid the Metrix proration problems that I demonstrated above.

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