Corporate Fiscal Financial calendar vs Projects default calendar

[Jrufin]

Hi,
Our corporate financial calendar is structured in this way:
JAN 2008 (from Jan 1 to 25)
FEB 2008 (from Jan 26 to Feb 22)
MAR 2008 (from Feb 23 to Mar 28)
and so on....

Question is, how can I change teh calendar in MPP so taht it is the same as
our financial calendar? Currently the calendar in project is defaulted to the
"normal" calendar, January is 1st to 31st, etc.....

The reason why I need this is for the financials reporting of the projects
costs, resource cost with emphasis on our fiscal financial calendar. Pls
help!

Thanks.

 

[Dave]

Hi,
Our corporate financial calendar is structured in this way:
JAN 2008 (from Jan 1 to 25)
FEB 2008 (from Jan 26 to Feb 22)
MAR 2008 (from Feb 23 to Mar 28)
and so on....

Question is, how can I change teh calendar in MPP so taht it is the same as
our financial calendar? Currently the calendar in project is defaulted to the
"normal" calendar, January is 1st to 31st, etc.....

The reason why I need this is for the financials reporting of the projects
costs, resource cost with emphasis on our fiscal financial calendar. Pls
help!

Thanks.

If you mean, can you make the timescale read 'January' when in fact it
is February, then the answer is no. If you right click on the
timescale, the options available to you are displayed.

If you want to report or filter on arbitrary intervals, then that is of
course possible. What exactly is it you want to do?

Am I right in thinking that your corporate calendar month ends on the
last (working?) Friday in every month?

 

[John]

Hi,
Our corporate financial calendar is structured in this way:
JAN 2008 (from Jan 1 to 25)
FEB 2008 (from Jan 26 to Feb 22)
MAR 2008 (from Feb 23 to Mar 28)
and so on....

Question is, how can I change teh calendar in MPP so taht it is the same as
our financial calendar? Currently the calendar in project is defaulted to the
"normal" calendar, January is 1st to 31st, etc.....

The reason why I need this is for the financials reporting of the projects
costs, resource cost with emphasis on our fiscal financial calendar. Pls
help!

Thanks.

Jrufin,
Unfortunately Project has never made provision for users to create
accounting month calendars. You can set the fiscal year to start on any
month, but timescaled data displayed in Project will always be in
calendar months. However, there are a few options. Perhaps the simplest
but definitely most tedious is to copy and paste selected accounting
month data from one of the Usage views into a spreadsheet. You could
also use the "analyze timescale data in Excel" utility and parse out the
accounting month data once it's in Excel. Project 2007 has expanded
capability with its visual reports feature but again, you would have to
parse out the accounting month data once it's in Excel. The best
approach is to use VBA to develop the accounting month data and then
dump it into another application (e.g. Excel). I chose the latter
approach when faced with requirements for accounting month data from
Project.

John
Project MVP

 

[Wilkster]

We have the same issue at our company. The best i have come up with is to deal
with the tasks on a week by week basis (since all fiscal months should end on
the same day of week, e.g. Friday). Just set the status date to the last fiscal
day of the month. If entering timephased data, you can write some macros that
allocate the data over each of the weeks in the fiscal month. If you need to
analyze the data on a fiscal month-by-month basis, you can export to excel on a
week by week basis and pivot by fiscal month. Again, writing macros to do this
simplifies things greatly.

Wilkster

 

[Steve House]

Just remember, guys, that Project is focussed on being a work scheduling and
overall cost estimating program and is not designed to be a financials
reporting program. That's an accounting job, not project management. What
fiscal month in which a task takes place doesn't really have much bearing on
getting the project done, doesn't have any signfigiant impact on getting the
right resource into the right place at the right time to do the right job to
get the project done as efficiently as possible. The costs accrue to your
books as the work proceeds. Project will tell you that the costs accrued on
XX date because that was when the work was done. But this really isn't cash
flow, revenues, or payments, it's merely the date the obligation is created.
The accountants might want to attribute it to this fiscal month or that but
what does that have to do with managing the project? There are other
accounting applications that would do a better job of that I'm sure - let
Project send them the raw data and use a purpose built application to turn
it into financial reports. Heck, it wouldn't be rocket science to build an
Excel spreadsheet that would take the timephased cost data from Project and
summarize the figures into your appropriate fiscal buckets. That's just the
sort of thing Excel is built for.

 

[Jrufin]

Thanks for everyone who gave their insight/opinions on this issue. I guess
better to do a weekly updates then...

Thanks again.