Fiscal Calendar

[Mauck]

Under Options-Calendar, the month in which the fiscal year
starts can be set. Is there a way for reporting to set
when the fiscal month starts, ie the first Saturday after
the last Friday of the month?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Mauck --

Fiscal year is assumed to begin on the first day of the month. Hope this
helps.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Dale,
That is what I understood. What I would like to know is
what we would need to do to change when the fiscal month
changes? From what I have seen so far, it can not be
changed from setting a configuration. What I would like
to do is to have a way to set the day for the beginning
and end of the fiscal month for reporting purposes.

Thank you for any input that you can provide me.

Chris

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Chris --

I'm sorry but I don't understand what you are trying to do with reporting
and fiscal year. Maybe I'm just dense this morning or something. Please
give me an example and then perhaps we can help you.

 

[Chris]

It is a tough one and it may be something that we could do
in a custom report. The scenario is as follows:

The Fiscal Year starts in November. That can be done
through a setting in Options on the Calendar
configurations.

The Fiscal Month starts on the Satuday after the last
Friday in the month and runs to the Friday of the month.
An example would for April of 2004, the fiscal month
begins on March 27th and Ends on April 30th. The Fiscal
month for May begins on May 1 and ends on 28th. I am told
that this is standard for some accounting reports. I have
a request to set the months to match fiscal months.

The request is an accounting request and the
implementation of MS EPM is driven by an initiative for
cost and schedule management (EVM) that speaks to the
fiscal cycles (fiscal months and fiscal years).

Thanks for any input you may have. I am not aware of any
functionality in Project that can speak to setting fiscal
months based on these standards. I can only assume that
this was a function that was seen in an EVM application
that was developed from a Cost prespective not a project
management/scheduling prespective.

Chris

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Chris --

As I stated originally, Project sets the Fiscal Year to start on the first
day of the month selected. If you wish to do some variation on printing
Reports based on your EVM reporting requirements, you can specify the exact
date range in the Print dialog box. Hope this helps.

 

[Steve House]

You can't set the month start and ending dates within the month. As you've
discovered you can set the month where that marks the beginning of the
fiscal year, but the fiscal month will always coincide with the calendar
month start and ending days, ie, starts on the 1st and ends on the 28th,
29th, 30th, or 31st depending on the month and there's no way to change it.
I know I sound like a broken record but Project is not a financial
management application - rather its financial functions are pretty well
limited to budget estimating and tracks actuals against budget basically to
monitor performance against estimates. The sort of relatively sophisticated
financial reporting it sounds like you've been requested to provide are well
outside its scope and you're better off exporting the raw data collected in
Project into a more suitable tool.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer/Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs