# Run a programme against a budget

*Whose job: the engineer. You should see a ranked list of works within the budget, and what it could not see.*

## What you are doing

You are asking the question the whole product exists for: given what we know about the network and the money we have, what should we do first?

This is the asset engineer's step, and its output is usually for somebody else — a finance officer building a budget bid, or a manager who has to defend a list at a committee meeting. Run it knowing who is going to read it, because the thing they will be asked is not "what is on the list" but "why is this road on it and that one not".

## What PaveKeep does with it

Nothing. This is worth saying plainly: running a programme saves no state and changes no data. It reads the current condition, applies the treatment rules and unit rates your council has set (or the platform defaults, if you have not changed them), ranks the candidates, and fills the budget you gave it.

Every road on the list carries the reason it is there and the rule that put it there. The output also states what it could NOT see — the share of the network with no survey behind it — because a programme covering 8% of the network and a programme covering 80% are different documents, and the difference must not be something the reader has to work out.

## What it will not do

- **The method** — A programme is a ranking under assumptions you can see, not a decision. It does not know about the school that is being rebuilt, the complaint from a councillor, or the water main that is being replaced under the same street next year. It is a starting point for the conversation, and it is designed to be argued with.
- **What you have not got yet** — It covers the part of the network that has been surveyed, and says what share that is. If that share is small, the honest reading of the output is "these are the works among the part we have looked at" — not "these are the works".
- **The product** — It saves nothing, so there is no programme to retract and no version to compare against later. If you need to keep one, produce a booklet or an export from it; if you need to compare two budgets, that is a scenario, which does save.
- **Your subscription** — The works programme is a module. If your council's subscription does not include it, the step is not hidden from you — it is unavailable, which is a different answer and one your city manager can change.

## How you know it worked

**Before:** a network with at least one survey filed against it.

**Do:** Reports, works programme, set a budget and a year.

**After:** a ranked list of roads with a treatment, a cost and a reason against each, totalling no more than the budget you gave. Above it, the share of the network the programme could see.

**If it looks wrong**, nothing needs undoing — re-run it. The two things most likely to be wrong are upstream of this step: the unit rates in your configuration, and how much of the network has actually been surveyed. Both are visible from here.

**Hand to:** finance, or whoever is assembling the bid. Send them the share-surveyed figure with the list — a programme quoted without it will be read as covering the whole network.

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**If it went in wrong:** there is nothing to undo at this step. What to do instead is under *what it will not do*, above.

A council reads these same four sections inside PaveKeep, beside the screen that does the work — the same sentences, held to the same source in both languages.

[← Set the rules, or accept the defaults](/how-it-works/config-rules) · [Ask what a different budget would buy →](/how-it-works/scenario-compare) · [All 13 steps](/how-it-works)

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Source: https://pavekeep.com.au/how-it-works/programme-run · PaveKeep · derived content