InEight Control is where project teams monitor and manage the financial health of a project.
It brings together budget, cost, progress, and forecast information to help teams understand where the project stands today, how performance is trending, and what the project is expected to cost at completion.
Let's look at how InEight Control establishes and maintains the project budget.
The Cost Breakdown Structure, or CBS, is the hierarchical structure used to organize your budget. Each line is referred to as a cost item. Lower level items roll up to the summary level items.
Control utilizes a concept of three distinct budgets to reflect how the budget is established, updated, and actively managed over time.
Tracking these budgets as distinct data sets enables variance analysis, comprehensive change tracking, and the most accurate forecasting.
We refer to these as the original budget, or OB, the current budget, or CB, and the current estimate, or CE.
The original budget is locked at the beginning of a project and serves as your baseline for comparison as the project progresses. Original budget values will never change once they're locked.
For a contractor, the original budget is typically associated with the signed contract value.
For an owner, this may be the final investment proposal or an initial approved budget established during the project feasibility phase.
The current budget is the project's operational budget and reflects the original budget plus all approved changes.
InEight Control uses a structured change process to manage budget updates and limit who can make changes to the current budget. Each proposed change is reviewed and either approved or rejected, and all activity is recorded for visibility and accountability.
Teams can also review how approved changes impact individual cost items, making it easier to understand where the budget has evolved.
The current estimate reflects the most up-to-date estimate of quantities, cost, and, when required, labor hours to complete a scope of work.
Unlike the current budget, the current estimate is flexible and is updated as new information becomes available.
Not all changes on a project result in a budget change. In many delivery models, teams are responsible for managing adjustments within the approved budget.
For example, a contractor who enters into a lump sum, design build, or EPC contract is responsible for quantity growth or reduction, which will not be compensated by the owner.
The current estimate fields allow users to continuously estimate the project, without affecting the accuracy of the budget values used to determine gains versus losses.
This makes the current estimate a critical input for understanding project performance and for supporting accurate forecasting.
While the current estimate contributes to forecasting, it is not the same as the project forecast. The estimate represents planned values for the remaining work, while the forecast combines those estimates with actual cost and progress to date to calculate an expected cost at completion.
In addition to maintaining budgets and estimates, Control captures actual quantities completed and costs incurred over time.
Completed quantities can be entered directly into InEight Control, imported from external systems, or automatically pulled from another InEight application.
By tracking actual progress alongside actual cost, InEight Control applies earned value principles to evaluate performance at the cost item level.
This allows teams to understand how much value has been earned based on progress, compared to what has been spent.
Rather than using the term variance, InEight Control reports performance as gain or loss. Gain or loss shows whether a cost item is performing better or worse than budget by comparing earned value to actual cost.
Additional metrics allow teams to view expected gain or loss at completion, helping identify emerging risks early.
As new actuals and progress are recorded, performance metrics update automatically, ensuring teams always have an up-to-date view of costs versus budget.
With cost and progress information in place, InEight Control helps project teams forecast where the project is headed.
Forecasting with InEight Control can range from a highly automated process, which uses automatic forecast calculations, to a completely user-controlled manual process.
Each cost item can be forecasted differently, and multiple versions of a project forecast can be maintained, shared, and compared, all within InEight Control.
Control includes multiple automated forecast methods that use actual cost to date and remaining work to project final cost. Forecasts update continuously as cost and progress change, removing the need to wait until month-end to see the impact of performance trends.
The difference between these methods is how the remaining work is valued.
Current budget forecasts remaining work using the current budget unit rate.
Current estimate forecasts remaining work using the current estimate unit rate.
Average performance forecasts remaining work using the average unit rate achieved to date for that cost item.
Another option for automated forecasting is the committed cost method. This method calculates the forecast by adding the total cost to date to any open committed cost, such as purchase orders.
In addition to standard forecasting options, InEight Control allows organizations to define custom forecast methods at the project or company level.
Custom methods enable teams to create formulas for forecasting cost and work hours using available data fields within Control, supporting consistent forecasting standards and advanced requirements.
InEight Control also supports additional forecast method types, such as contract-based forecasts, detail estimates to complete, and time-phased manual forecasts, providing flexibility for different delivery models and levels of control.
To support analysis over time, Control stores monthly forecast snapshots based on fiscal calendar settings.
These snapshots allow teams to track how the forecast is changed from month to month and to compare the current outlook to previous expectations.
InEight Control provides a structured way for project teams to understand and manage project financial performance.
By organizing budgets, tracking changes, capturing actual cost and progress, and projecting outcomes, Control supports clear visibility into how a project is performing and how that performance is evolving over time.
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