Using drivers – Runway Help Center

Understanding drivers

Start with your business model

Drivers are those metrics and KPIs you use to track the health of your business. On Runway, they help you track changes and make charts easily—without using cell references or entering the formula each time.

In general, if it’s an important piece of your business model, we recommend adding it as a driver on Runway.

Add anything you like

Drivers can be discreet (like cost of rent), or segmented (monthly revenue per product), or consolidated (sum of all salaries across your org).

Here are some more examples:

💰 Cash Flow (Cash): The money coming in and going out in a month.

🔥 Burn Rate (Burn): How fast you're using up your financial resources.

☁️ Cloud SaaS costs: Expenses for your cloud SaaS tools and related services.

🛫 Runway: How long your business can keep operating before it runs out of cash.

Add more details

Start by giving your drivers human-readable names. (You can even use emojis!) That list just above is a good example.

Add a Formula to calculate forecasted values for your driver. Formulas are human-readable too, and only have to be entered once. (Read more about them here.)

Want to track historical values instead? No problem. Calculate the value of your driver using Actuals pulled from your database instead. (More details here.)

Do more with drivers:

Star a driver to track it as a KPI.

Add a description to help everyone on your team understand it better.

See a list of all the models your driver shows up in.

Choose a format for the values your driver can have (number, percentage, currency, etc).

Got a goal your driver should hit in the next 6 months? Add a specific value and date to keep track of progress.

See the Forecast Formula used to calculate future values, or the Actuals Formula used to show historical values for your driver.

Check out the exact variables that impact your driver directly, or dive into the list of factors that affect your driver indirectly.

Use drivers as shortcuts

Want to use ‘🔥 Burn’ somewhere on Runway? Once you’ve created the driver, just type its name to use it anywhere. No need to enter the formula each time.

Use driver names to calculate other variables: like dividing ‘💵Cash’ by ‘🔥 Burn’ to calculate ‘🛫 Runway’.

When you use a driver’s name in a Report, you get the exact numerical value of that driver from a specific point in time: like the amount of capital burned in Aug ‘22.

Use drivers to create charts and trendlines automatically. (Read more here.)

Use dimensions to go granular

We recommend creating drivers only for the key variables that make up your business model. Add sub-categories or tags using dimensions.

For example, say your business operates in 2 regions: the US and Canada. Then:

‘💸 Revenue’ would be a driver.

Breaking down ‘💸 Revenue’ by region would give you sub-categories or dimensions of this driver. These can be added separately.

⚠️

Avoid going too granular with drivers. In the example given above, creating a new driver for revenue generated from each region would complicate your formulas. Instead of just using the aggregate ‘💸 Revenue,’ you’d now have to list all of your regional revenue drivers. Keep it broad to keep it simple.

Working with drivers

Adding a new driver

Open a page in the Model section, and click ‘+ Add driver’.

Name your driver and press ‘Enter’ to create it. We call this process initializing a driver—it creates a driver that’s not already present in your database.

You’ll see default values for Forecast and Actuals Formulas in the columns to the right—in the form of “[Name of driver] Last month”—these are automatically created for all new drivers.

You can double-click on the default formulas to update them.

Forecast Formula calculates future values, based on current trends. You can also click the f symbol that shows up next to the driver's name when you hover over its cell in the ‘driver’ column.

Actuals Formula calculates values from the historical data that’s usually pulled from your integrations.

💡

You can also add a driver by typing the name directly into a Formula. If the driver doesn’t exist yet, you’ll see the option ‘+ Create driver’ in the autofill. Click it or press Enter to add the driver in the next row.

Seeing or changing a driver’s details

The driver detail view shows your driver’s description, formulas, values, along with how it affects or is affected by other variables. Use it to explore your model and understand the relationships between different parts of it.

This is what it looks like. To access it, click the arrow symbol (or the Runway logo) that shows up next to the driver's name while hovering over it. You can also select the driver's name cell and press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

Here’s what you can do in the driver detail view:

Add a description to share more context with everyone on your team.

See the list of all the models the driver shows up in. You can add or remove models.

Change the format of the values the driver can take (eg: currency, number, percentage).

Add a goal for the driver. For example: this could be a number that the driver should hit in the next 6 months.

Use Rollup by to select an aggregation method (sum, average, first, last) for showing the driver’s data in the time series.

Check or edit the Formulas. Forecast calculates future values from current trends; Actuals calculate historical values from the data pulled from your Integrations.

See the variables that impact your driver—directly or indirectly—in the Inputs section. You can use these to debug formulas or to track down errors.

See the list of other drivers that use the current one as an input in the Used By section.

Check the Plans section to see if there are any plans impacting the driver.

Adding dimensions to a driver

Think of dimensions as tags or subcategories for drivers. You can use them as properties to segment certain drivers, such as department, customer type, or location. Adding dimensions gives you a more granular understanding (find out more here).

You can add dimensions in 3 different ways:

From a model page, right-click a driver and select Dimensions → Add dimensions.

From a database page, open the object detail view by clicking the arrow symbol that appears next to the object’s name when you over it. Once in detail view, click Add property → Dimension → Create new dimension.

From the Settings menu, select Dimensions → Add dimension. (To open the Settings menu, click on the circle with the first letter of your name at the top right of the screen, and then click Settings.)

Once you add dimensions to a driver, it becomes what we call a ‘dimensionalized driver’—which means it has multiple inputs, such as different teams for headcount expenses.

💡

Once you have the formula for the first dimensional driver, you can copy it using Cmd/Ctrl + C and paste it into the other dimensional drivers using Cmd/Ctrl + V. The dimension will be reflected in the new formulas too.

Expanding a driver by dimensions

You can do that by right-clicking on the driver’s name and selecting Dimensions → Expand by dimension.

For example, if you expand the Headcount driver, and your roles are SDR, Engineer, Design, Operations, and Product, clicking on Dimensions → Expand by dimension → Role will automatically create the following dimensional drivers:

Exploring advanced driver options

To access the options menu for drivers:

You can click on the six dots icon that shows up to the left of the driver’s name when hovering over its row.

Or you can right-click on the driver’s name.

Let’s look at the options one-by-one:

Open detail view

See all the information about a driver such as the name, model, formulas, related drivers, and values. You can also update this information and understand the relationship between different drivers.

Duplicate

Create a copy of a driver. The new driver will have the same name as the original, with the word “Copy” added to the end. You can double-click on the new driver’s name to rename it.

Format

Modify the driver's value format (automatic, currency, number, integer, percentage), adjust the precision (decimal places), indent or outdent the driver's name, or add a background color to the entire row.

Mark as KPI / Unmark as KPI

Mark a driver as a key performance indicator (KPI). This will allow you to visualize it on pages and highlight the change delta in scenario comparison.

Dimensions

Expand the driver using existing dimensions already defined in your models, or add new ones.

Group

Move the selected driver to a new group.

Move to

Move the selected driver to another model, and remove it from the current one.

Delete

When you click this option, a confirmation message will appear. If you’re sure you want to delete the driver, click Delete.

⚠️

If you delete a driver, all formulas tied to it will throw up errors and will need to be updated.

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