Close Monthly Cycle
Use Case
The project team has been working to prepare month-end reports to share with stakeholders. As the suspended period, or plus days, elapses, the Live Forecast snapshot is saved, and a new Live Forecast is created for the next period. The team generates reports based off the reviewed project data and pushes the updated forecast to their ERP system.
This section covers the final steps of the monthly reporting cycle, including generating reports and closing out project data.
Run and Review Month-end Reports
Month-end reports are prepared over “plus days” – a suspended period during which the project team can finalize the forecast numbers without incurring any new actuals.
At the end of this suspended period, the team has likely completed a variety of tasks, such as finalizing and confirming actuals, processing payroll, documenting accruals, and reviewing forecasts. With these tasks completed, the team can now generate reports to share with key stakeholders.
Reporting with InEight Report
InEight Report has a variety of preconfigured reports to help you monitor key performance indicators. After you select a report, you can refine the parameters to meet your specific needs.
Following are some examples of reports that can be generated for budgeting and forecasting management:
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Adjusted budget
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Budget move history
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Capital projects financials
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Cash flow
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Cost report by cost category
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Forecast health
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Project cost summary
Users with the correct permissions can run reports as needed or create subscriptions for themselves or other users. Through subscriptions, a user receives reports saved as views directly via email.
Access the following links for additional information about reporting:
Reporting with InEight Explore
Use InEight Explore to analyze budgeting and forecasting details through self-service dashboards and analytics. You can use pre-defined dashboards, create custom dashboards, and integrate data from other systems.
Following are some examples of dashboards that may be useful during month-end reporting:
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Change issue
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Manhour curves
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Project controls
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Project performance
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Schedule
Access the following links for additional information about InEight Explore:
Month End (Hard Close)
To close out month-end reporting, a Live Forecast snapshot is taken and a new Live Forecast is created for the next period. If your organization uses an ERP system, you can publish the month-end forecast to the ERP to keep project data up to date.
Live Forecast Snapshot
Each month a snapshot is saved of the Live Forecast. The snapshot can then be viewed for comparisons or benchmarking purposes.
Snapshots can also be selected in the Forecast Delta data block to easily compare two periods. Green and red coloring show increases or decreases between the two periods, respectively.
If the setting is enabled, users with the correct permissions can take a manual snapshot, which will then be saved as the Live Forecast snapshot. If a manual snapshot has not been saved during the month, the system will automatically save a Live Forecast snapshot on the month-end day.
The following steps show an example of working with Live Forecast snapshots.
Step 1
The month-end day for the previous period was the 6th, so a new Live Forecast snapshot was taken automatically by the system on that day. The project controller can view this snapshot in the Live Forecast data block.
Step 2
From the drop-down menu, she hovers over View draft snapshot. A tool tip appears with information about the most recent Live snapshot. The last snapshot was taken on the 9th.
She clicks View draft snapshot. Now she can view the actuals as of the last snapshot (taken on the 9th).
Step 3
The project controller wants to capture forecast details as of today. From the drop-down menu, she clicks Take live snapshot. This overwrites the last draft snapshot from the 9th.
Step 4
She also wants to compare snapshots between two periods. She moves to the Forecast Delta data block.
She opens the first drop-down menu and selects the March snapshot. In the second drop-down, she selects June.
The Forecast Delta data block now shows changes between the two periods.
In addition to project forecasts, you can also capture revenue snapshots on the Pay Items register.
Access the following links to learn more about snapshots::
Publish Forecast to ERP
If your organization uses an ERP, then that is the source of record for your project data. To ensure the ERP is updated with the current project data from Control, you can perform a sync. As a best practice, a sync should be initiated once the forecast details have been reviewed and finalized.
To push the forecast to the ERP, start on the Actions menu. Select Sync > Push CBS structure, Budget, Live forecast, and Actual qty.
