# Ask what a different budget would buy

*Whose job: the engineer. You should see a saved scenario, and the condition the network ends at under it.*

## What you are doing

You are asking what a different budget would buy. A programme answers "what should we do with this much"; a scenario answers "and what would happen if it were more, or less, or spread differently over five years".

This is the step that produces the slide. It is usually the engineer building it and the city manager using it, and it is worth building the "do nothing" case even when nobody asked for it, because that is the comparison every funding argument rests on.

## What PaveKeep does with it

A scenario, saved, with the year-by-year result it produced: what gets treated in each year, what it costs, and what condition the network ends at.

Unlike the programme, this one is kept. That is the difference between the two and the reason both exist: a programme is this year's working answer, and a scenario is a comparison you intend to show somebody later.

## What it will not do

- **The method** — A ten-year scenario is a model, and the further out it goes the less it is worth. It is honest about direction — more money ends better than less — and it should not be quoted to two decimal places in year nine.
- **What you have not got yet** — It forecasts the network it can see. The unsurveyed part is not in it, so a scenario over a thinly surveyed network describes a fraction of the problem.
- **Your role** — Building a scenario needs the programme capability. Reading one does not — which is deliberate, because the person who has to defend it is rarely the person who built it.
- **Your subscription** — Scenarios are a module. If your council's subscription does not include them, the programme still runs; what you lose is the comparison.

## How you know it worked

**Before:** a network with a survey, and a programme you have already run once.

**Do:** Reports, scenarios. Set a budget and a number of years, and save it.

**After:** the scenario listed, with its condition outcome per year.

**If it was wrong**, delete it. A scenario is a saved question, not a record of anything that happened, so removing one destroys nothing.

**Hand to:** whoever is making the case. Send the comparison, not the single scenario — one number on its own invites the question "compared to what".

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**If it went in wrong:** this step can be undone, and the undoing stays on the record rather than erasing what happened.

[← Run a programme against a budget](/how-it-works/programme-run) · [Produce the documents you have to file →](/how-it-works/documents-file) · [All 13 steps](/how-it-works)

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