Review Actual Details
Use Case
With actual costs and man-hours up to date, these values are ready to be applied to earned value metrics in dashboards and reporting. Prior to this, the project controls manager double-checks the details to make sure values updated properly.
You may need to check actuals details to confirm what cost and man-hour entries have posted. In InEight Control, you can easily view details for each actuals entry such as posting date, cost category, and who submitted the entry.
Follow the steps below to view the details and entry history for your project actuals.
Step 1
To review actuals details for a cost item, right click on the cost item and select Actuals details.
Step 2
On the slide-out panel, open the Actuals History tab.
Step 3
Click the date hyperlink to see additional details on the entry.
Accruals
An important consideration is how to account for costs that have been incurred throughout the month before they are imported as actual costs. To account for these incurred costs, you can post accrual entries in the interim that can be reversed out after month end.
An accrual is a temporary posting of cost that debits (cost in) in the period intended and then credits (cost out) the following period (month). Valuated good receipts or actual accruals are essentially accomplishing the same thing. They’re putting in cost before you pay the invoice, so you can accurately reflect progress (budget earned) against expenditures (cost plus accruals).
Accruals are most commonly required for subcontracts or material purchase orders where valuated good reciepts are not turned on.
Ideas on Site
Typically your organization will use one of the following three methods for performing month-end accruals:
Option 1: Accruals are entered directly into your ERP and posted as actual cost in the current month, then auto-reversed out with a negative cost posting from the ERP after month end.
Option 2: The project controls manager maintains an Excel import template for month-end accruals. The file, labeled with the month/year, would only contain accrual postings for that month. These are then imported into InEight Control via Excel actuals import. After month-end close date, the project controls manager uses the same Excel file, but changes all entries to negative values and re-imports them as actuals into InEight Control. In this option, it’s crucial to maintain the Excel file with all accruals that were imported, so they can be accurately reversed as negative values, to avoid duplicate actual cost postings.
Option 3: Within InEight Control, projects can elect to turn on Estimate Actuals (under Project Settings > Control). For subcontracts and material/supply purchase orders, this enables an estimated actual cost (based on quantity claimed x estimated unit cost) to be recorded for forecasting and analysis purposes before the actuals costs hit the project. This essentially created an automated accrual. When turned on, estimated actuals will automatically populate in InEight Control from quantities completed in InEight Plan and Progress. After month-end, you will use the actions menu in InEight Control to reverse out the estimated actuals.
For more information on using this feature, consult the following document: