Topical Information

This program will give you more practice branching, calling standard library functions, looping and playing with character input's clever applications. (There may also be a chance to write your own functions -- to clean up the program and ease development -- to practice with randomness, or even to use more advanced input features. See the Options section below.)

Background Information

The company you work for uses information about the current year's planned budget compared to the current year's expenditures to decide what next year's budget will be.

Program Information

Write a program that helps the user -- prospectively a manager at the company -- determine the budget for the next year. You should gather from them both the budgetted amount for last year and the amount spent for last year. For each, the user may enter the currency units either in front or in back of the value. If they enter neither, you are to assume that currency is measured in dollars ($). Although it shouldn't happen, if they enter something in both places, you should be able to handle that, too.

Then calculate for them the percent of their budget that was used -- this may be over 100%. This percent should be rounded to the nearest whole percent. Finally, force their spending up to the next $100 and tell them that this figure will be their budget for the next year.

Make sure you print their results in a nice way. Use the currency unit they entered at the beginning (or $). Be sure to place this marker either in front or in back of the new budget just like they entered it. (If they didn't enter the units, place the $ in the front by default.) And always print two decimal places (even though we shouldn't have any change to report). Also print the percent of their budget that was used with a percent sign (%) after it.

As an example, you might have the program interaction look something like (the parts in blue are typed by the user):

$ budgetproj.out

                 Welcome to the Budget Projection Program!!!

What was your budget allotment last year?  $1300.00
Fine, and how much did you spend last year?  $1432.00

Thank you!!  Calculating...  Done.

Last year you used up about 110% of your budget.

Your budget next year will be $1500.00.

Thank you for using the BPP!!

Endeavor to have a fiscally fit day!

$

Note how the percent rounded down but the new budget amount went up.

This assignment is (Level 4).

Options

• Add (Level 1) to have your program repeat as often as the user desires.
• Add (Level 2) to have your input validate the user's entry format. For this particular input, that is made tricky by the optionality of the currency symbol.
  However, if the user has entered what should be a number, make sure it is numeric. All the while, make sure that they can still place spaces between all parts of the currency entry -- Freedom of Input Act of 1987, remember? *grin*
  (Recall that, although the ws manipulator will eat any upcoming whitespace in the buffer, it treats \n no differently than any of the other spacing characters...and thus can cross over the user's original Entery.)
• Add (Level 2.5) to add a menu structure to the program so that they can set options. Perhaps something like this:

      Budget Projection Menu
  
      1) Project Budget for Next Year
      2) fLip Coin for Rounding [NO]
      3) Weight Distribution for budGet percentaGe [NO]
      4) Quit
  

  The first option (chosen by the user entering 1, P, p, B, b, N, n, Y, or y) acts as the program currently does. The second option (chosen by the user entering 2, L, l, C, c, R, or r) controls an option that determines how to round for next year's budget. When its state (indicated in the square brackets after the menu choice text) is NO, the program will round as indicated above. When its state is YES, the program act as described in the virtual coin toss option below. The default state will be NO. If the user choses this option, the state will change to YES. If the user choses this option again, the state will change back to NO.
  The third option (chosen by the user entering 3, W, w, D, d, G, or g) controls an option that determines if the percentage of the current expenditures taken as the basis for next year's budget should be uniform or weighted (see the virtual coin option and its follower below). The default state for this option is NO and chosing it will only toggle to YES if the coin option is YES. When the coin option is NO, selecting this menu option has no effect and should probably print a message to that effect.
  (Note that this program option subsumes the 'repeat as desired' option so you get credit for that option's level, too!)
  (This option does not subsume either the 'coin toss' option nor the 'weighted distribution' option, however. You can take those options and this option independent of one another. All of their levels will stack together.)
• Add (Level 4) to write the program using at least these eight (8) functions:
  • printing the opening message
  • printing the closing message
  • printing a monetary amount with proper formatting
  • printing all of the results
  • rounding a value to the nearest desired 'place'
  • rounding a value to the next highest desired 'place'
  • calculating what decimal percent one value is of another
  • calculating the projected budget (uses 'next highest' function)
  The use of more than these functions along with your main is strongly encouraged! Some further suggestions may be found below...
• Add (Level 0.5) to add a third rounding function to 'round out' the group (sorry; couldn't resist; *chuckle*). This one should force a value to the next lowest desired 'place'.
• Add (Level 2) to create a library for all rounding specific functions -- those that round, force a value up, or force a value down.
• Add (Level 1.5) to use a default value for an argument to your rounding functions (both/all) that tells the position to round to (1s, 10s, 100s, 0.1s, 0.01s, etc.).
• Add (Level 1.5) to make appropriate use of inline functions.
• Add (Level 2) to create a library for your percent function. (Note that this will be a different and separate library from the rounding library above!)
• Add (Level 1.5) to use a single function for your input of both last year figures (budget and spent) (it will have no function inputs and two function outputs). (If you are doing library option(s), this function should go in your main program file as it doesn't relate to either rounding or percents.)
• Add (Level 3) to print a message about the 'percent used' figure based on its relationship to 100%:

  Message choice based on percent of budget spent relative to 100%.

  Percent Relationship to 100%	Message Displayed
  > 100%	This overspending will bankrupt the company!
  == 100%	Way to keep your eye on the ball, Johnson!
  < 100%	Thanks to you, this company will be solvent for years to come!

• You realize that your company's policy of rounding up to the next $100 wouldn't work for all companies. Other companies have budgets that are orders of magnitude beyond your puny little company budget. You can utilize the idea of determining how many digits are in a whole number to scale your '100' figure to be 10% of their budget's magnitude. So, if their spending were [10000, 100000), you would round their next year budget to the next $1000. Or if they were spending in the [100000, 1000000) range, you would round their next year budget to the next $10000. Of course, if they were spending only [100, 1000), they'd end up with a budget rounded only to the next $10. *shrug* Them's the breaks!
  Doing this, BTW, is worth an additional (Level 1.5).

• After pondering your boss' budget decisions from previous years, you decide that she must be flipping a coin! Add (Level 3) to flip a virtual coin to decide whether to use the above method of forcing the current spending amount to the next (higher) $100 to calculate the next year's budget or to round the current spending to the closest one-hundred. (This may be either higher or lower than the current year's spending. Base the direction of the rounding on whether the last two digits of the current budget is below or above 50... *grin*)
  Which ever way your virtual coin tells you to 'round off' the hundreds, get the intermediate new budget figure -- the one to actually 'round off' -- by calculating anywhere from 60% to 120% of the current expenditures. Decide the actual percentage used randomly -- assuming a uniform distribution between 60 and 120%.
  You can even add (Level 4) to adjust the percentage distribution from uniform to weighted toward the end indicated by the current expenditures' relationship to the original budget. If the expenditures represent underspending, weight the percentage toward the 120% end of the range. If the expenditures represent an overage, weight the percentage toward the 60% end of the range.
  (Hint: There are many ways to 'weight' a distribution of random values. When we first studied random value generation we looked at weighting a random bool value by using a larger modulo 'divisor' in [possible] conjunction with a !. Other ways include:
  • You can use [virtual] 'trials' or 'elimination rounds' -- 3 rounds should do it -- where the lower or upper bound of the range is determined by the last random value. This will shift the eventual value toward one end or the other. (Think of a sports tournament where teams compete to chose an eventual winner. Here, though, it is the random values which are being eliminated at each stage of the 'competition'. ...um...I suppose battling random percentages would determine a winner by flipping a coin..? *shrug*)
  • You can use unfair coin flips to decide the boundary conditions.
  • You can pick a middle value -- [80, 100]? -- uniformly and then pick a 'shifting factor' based on the end to be weighted more favorably. This would be a positive translation amount for the 120 end or a negative one for the 60 end.
  And those are just a few of the ways.)