About Financial Entries
The PPM Pro project financial entries feature supports projects that require financial management: projects with financial components that need to be recorded and reported on as part of the project management process. Your organization may have other types of projects that do not require financials, in which case this feature can be excluded from those project configurations.
If you are a user with PPM Pro administrative privileges, please refer to Overview for Administrators and be sure to use the self-service administration (SSA) facility to set up project financial entries for your end users.
Certain PPM Pro fields are out-of-the-box computed fields that are programmed to display calculated results. These fields can be used in reports, and are also referenced on the project Rollups section. See Financial Computed Fields for a list of fields and their formulas.
Note: Because the financial entries can be configured by customers using SSA, there might be screenshots in the documentation that don't match what you see on your screen - you might have more or fewer fields on your grid. Typically, the documentation will show as many features as possible.
Overview
A project's financials are managed on the Financial Entries grid, which is located in the Financials section of a project. A "financial entry" is a combination of a forecast entry and one or more actuals entry. (If you do not see a Financials section in your project's left-nav links, please contact your PPM Pro administrator.)
Your organization can set up various financial entry categories to meet its financial management needs. Different forecast and actuals forms can be provided to support expenses or revenue entries, such as labor, capitalized, or general expenses, as well as project revenue. Each entry type is configured as a cash "inflow" or an "outflow" entry, and the system sums the associated amounts accordingly.
Typically, project managers will enter forecast amounts, and authorized project resources will enter their actuals. Who can access the entries and what kind of access they have is determined by permission profiles.
The amount for both forecast and actuals entries can be entered as lump sum values, or can be distributed across a date range. The distribution of amounts is referred to as "contouring". Contouring is useful for managing recurring expenses or revenue items - instead of creating multiple entries with the same amount, one lump sum can be entered and then contoured evenly and automatically, with each contour representing the recurring value. See Editing Contours and Dates.
Both forecasts and actuals are tracked at the project level, but can optionally be associated with specific tasks.
Financial entries can have notes and attachments. This is useful for attaching invoices and organizing other supporting documents. See Notes and Attachments.
Permissions
To help project managers ensure their project forecasts and actuals are valid and protected, certain users can be granted permission to view, edit, and generally manage project level entries. For example, perhaps some project team members can view, create, edit, and delete their actuals only, while the project owner can additionally adjust forecast amounts.
Capitalized and Labor Entries
The Capitalized and Labor standard fields can be added to forecast details only (see complete list of standard fields). The actuals entries will inherit their values from the associated forecast. If neither of these fields are used, the entry is considered non-capitalized and non-labor.
Project Templates
If you use a template project from which to create new projects, you can choose to copy the forecast entries to the new project so you do not have to set them up manually each time. Select the "Financial Entries - Forecasts" checkbox to copy forecast entries and their amounts. By default, the From Date will be on or offset from the project Start Date (from the target/new project) based on its original From Date within the template project.
Alerts
The Project/Alerts section includes an alert called "Financial Entry Modification" that alerts the project owner when any modifications are made to financial forecasts/actuals. Additionally, you can build a new alerts to monitor the creation and deletion of financial entries. See Creating Alerts to learn how to create an alert. When creating alerts, the "Alert For" droplist contains the following financial entry alerts: "Finance Entry Creation," "Finance Entry Deletion," and "Finance Entry Modification".
Reporting on Project Financial Entries
The following report sources are available for reporting on project financial entries:
- All Financial Entries on a Project
- All Financial Entries on Projects in a Department
- All Financial Entries on Projects in a Portfolio
- All Financial Entries on Projects in a Portfolio and its Sub Portfolios
- All Financial Planning by Financial Entries on a Project Time Series
- All Financial Planning by Financial Entries on Projects in a Department Time Series
- All Financial Planning by Financial Entries on Projects in a Portfolio and its Sub Portfolios Time Series
- All Financial Entries on Projects in a Portfolio Time Series
See Rollups and Reports for more information.
What Next?
Please take a look at Working with the Financial Entries Grid to familiarize yourself with the screen, and then start playing around with creating financial entries, which is described here: Creating Forecasts and Entering Actuals.