Scenarios

What a scenario is

A scenario is a saved calculation. When you run a calculation for a house and save it, SILWise takes everything that went into that result and everything that came out of it, and locks it away as a fixed record. Open that scenario next week, next month, or next year, and it still shows exactly what it showed on the day you saved it.

What gets locked in

Saving a scenario locks in three things at once:

• The figures - every rent, food, utility and other cost figure that was in place for that house on the day you calculated.
• The Centrelink rates - the government benefit rates used to work out what each participant can be charged.
• The calculation rules - a stamp showing which version of SILWise’s working-out method produced the result, so if that method ever changes, this scenario still says plainly which rules it followed.

Because all three are locked in together, a saved scenario is a complete, self-contained picture of one calculation at one moment.

Why that matters

Centrelink rates change from time to time, SILWise’s own working-out method occasionally changes too, and the costs recorded for a house move on. None of that reaches back and touches a scenario you’ve already saved. A scenario from six months ago keeps showing six-months-ago figures, six-months-ago rates and six-months-ago rules, no matter what has changed since. That’s what makes a saved scenario a record you can rely on - for an audit, for answering a participant’s question, or for comparing what changed between two dates.

Drafts versus saved scenarios

Before you save a calculation, it’s a draft. A draft can be changed freely: adjust figures, rerun it, try it a different way, as many times as you like. Nothing is locked in yet.

Saving turns that draft into a scenario. From that moment it stops being a work in progress and becomes a fixed record of what was worked out. Saving also clears the draft you were using for that house, since the draft has done its job.

You can’t edit a saved scenario

Once a scenario is saved, it cannot be edited. There’s no way to change its figures, rates or result afterwards - that’s the entire point of locking them in.

If a saved scenario needs correcting, use Clone as draft. This starts a fresh, editable draft carrying over the original’s calculation date and subsidy settings - but not its cost figures. The cost figures come fresh from the house as it stands today, so if costs have changed since the original was saved, rerunning the clone uses today’s costs, not the frozen ones. Save that draft and it becomes a new scenario alongside the old one, not a replacement for it. If a scenario was a genuine mistake, you can remove it instead using Delete.

Next steps

For the step-by-step of saving a calculation, see save a scenario. To produce documents from a saved scenario, see download PDFs. To understand the Centrelink rates a scenario locks in, see Centrelink benchmarks.