Fiscal Calendars

[Miaplacidus]

Project plans according to calendar months. We use COBRA for some of our
reporting requirements, but COBRA is set up on fiscal months.

So, I may have 160 hours scheduled for August in Project, but in COBRA
August is defined as July 30 to Aug 26.

My task is to get the hours accurately converted from the project plan to
COBRA. My initial response is WTH: let August be August and put 140 hours in
COBRA and be done with it. Apparently some people believe this will raise
havoc when it comes to variance reports.

Anybody had similar experience?

Can I create a COBRA like calendar for Project, somehow?

Failing that, I suppose I have to create a lookup table in Excel or
something, and write some code to do a day by day transfer, by task and
resource. BARF.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

All I can say is that the day by day, assignment by assignment conversion is
very feasible in VBA.
I can give you a snippet if necessary.
HTH

 

[John]

Project plans according to calendar months. We use COBRA for some of our
reporting requirements, but COBRA is set up on fiscal months.

So, I may have 160 hours scheduled for August in Project, but in COBRA
August is defined as July 30 to Aug 26.

My task is to get the hours accurately converted from the project plan to
COBRA. My initial response is WTH: let August be August and put 140 hours in
COBRA and be done with it. Apparently some people believe this will raise
havoc when it comes to variance reports.

Anybody had similar experience?

Can I create a COBRA like calendar for Project, somehow?

Failing that, I suppose I have to create a lookup table in Excel or
something, and write some code to do a day by day transfer, by task and
resource. BARF.

Miaplacidus,
As Jan mentioned, creating accounting month data from Project's calendar
month data is very doable with VBA. I have written two such macros, the
latest was for a client who is also using COBRA.

John
Project MVP

 

[Miaplacidus]

That would be great. I know the gist of looping through the collections, but
that's about it.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

See if this inspires you:

Dim Job as Task
Dim TSVW as timescalevalues
Dim Ctr0 as integer
Dim Ctr as integer
Dim Wrk as single
Dim Thedate as date

for each Job in activeproject.tasks
if not job is nothing then
for each Asg in Job.assignments
set tsvw=asg.timescaledata(Job.start,job.finish,pjAssignmentTimescaledWork,pjtimescaledays,1)
ctr0=tsvw.count
For ctr=1 to Ctr0
wrk=val(tsvw(ctr))/60
TheDate=vba.dateadd("d",(ctr-1),job.start)

'Now up to you to write a routine that discovers in which Cobra month this date falls
'and to add the work value into that Cobra month

next ctr
next Asg
end if
next job


Good Luck!

 

[Miaplacidus]

Super, Thanks.

Miaplacidus,
As Jan mentioned, creating accounting month data from Project's calendar
month data is very doable with VBA. I have written two such macros, the
latest was for a client who is also using COBRA.

John
Project MVP

 

[John]

Super, Thanks.

Miaplacidus,
I'm not sure how much I helped other than to confirm that it is doable,
but you're welcome.
John

 

[stuart.trahan]

I ran across this many years ago when exporting data to MPM and
Cobra ... for this reason I wrote and now have a full development
staff continuing the improvement of our product called Export
forProject. trust me ... you do not want to tackle translating time
scaled data to your EVMS from MSP ... there is way more to consider
that just parsing out and regrouping TSV data in MSP. We have solved
for many EVMS integration issues for Microsoft Project. If you would
like more info ... please contact my director of operations, Mr. Gary
Smith at (e-mail address removed) or by phone at (281) 238-8911.
Hope we can be of some help.

Stuart Trahan
Founder and CTO
forProject Technology, Inc.