Starting Fiscal Month/Year on Dec 21?

[IT Project Manager? I wish!]

Is it possible to start the fiscal month / year on a date other than the 1st of the month? My companies work periods (for example) run from Dec 21, 2003 to Jan 24, 2004 for the fiscal month of January, 2004. I have tried setting the fiscal calendar, but it does not provide a means to set the specific date

Would I have to create a macro? I have experience in VB (don't let my co-workers know, they would want me to actually work for a change).

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi ,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Not possible, sorry :-( Try sending it as a wish to Microsoft Support:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

Is it possible to start the fiscal month / year on a date other than the

1st of the month? My companies work periods (for example) run from Dec 21,
2003 to Jan 24, 2004 for the fiscal month of January, 2004. I have tried
setting the fiscal calendar, but it does not provide a means to set the
specific date.

Would I have to create a macro? I have experience in VB (don't let my

co-workers know, they would want me to actually work for a change).

 

[John]

I wish,
One thing that Project has never been able to do is to provide the
option for a financial month that is different from the normal calendar
month. Unfortunately, some companies need this feature (ours did as
apparetnly yours does also). In our case I created a VBA macro that made
the conversion and presented the resultant data in Excel (i.e. cost,
headcount, etc.). Since you have VB experience, it sounds like you may
have some coding to do. Have fun - I sure did.

John

 

[Steve House]

But when you tell an employee that he needs to start work on something
on a certain date and should be finished by another date, do you
communicate with him using your fiscal calendar or do you use the
regular "civil" everyday calendar? Since Project is basically all about
scheduling work and workers, and the financial reports are frosting on
that cake for budget and headcount estimating purposes, is the lack of
such highly customizable fiscal calendars so important?

 

[John]

Steve,
I would hardly call a company's financial system "frosting on the cake".
Employees still have watches with 60 seconds per hour and calendars on
their cubicle wall that show 7 days per week with Jan 1 as the first of
the year. But, the hours that they do work are accumulated into a
financial system that says Jan 23, '04 is the end of the financial
month. All company accounting systems and some contracts are based on a
4-4-5 system and it works quite well except when interfacing with a
project management application such as Project. Therefore, despite
Project's lack of flexibility in this area, we make the app fit our need
and we're actually quite "civil" about it

John

 

[Steve House]

My point is that a company's financial reporting systems and Project's
financial estimating abilities are two entirely different creatures
built for entirely different purposes and any possible integration
between the two is purely accidental. Project is intended to be a tool
for planning the schedule and estimating the costs of the work that will
be required to complete a discrete project and it tracks actuals solely
for the intent of monitoring performance against plan. The cost figures
Project produces for its projections and its actuals, even its cash flow
reporting, etc, IMHO should only be used within the microcosm of
managing the project itself. The costs etc for your corporate
financials should be accumulated independently, Project's figures simply
not being accurate enough for accounting purposes. Accumulate those
employee hours from your payroll system and use that as an *input* to
both Project and your financial reporting, *not* accumulating it in
Project and trying to then export it to the financial system - it's just
not accurate enough and the fiscal month problem is only a small portion
of the problem. A bigger problem is that the resource costs in Project,
even if accurate to the penny, are ONLY the costs associated with the
specific work hours consumed in creating the project deliverables and
does not even come close to reflecting the resource's true cost to the
organization. My preference is to use Project's costing tools purely
for project budget planning and project progress monitoring and not even
try to use them as the input into other accounting applications.

 

[John]

Steve,
I don't disagree with your argument. My point is simply that since
Project is the underlying app used for planning and tracking progress in
our earned value environment, we have a need to extract the initial plan
(baseline) and later the progress (tracking) information to calculate
earned value in terms of our financial calendar. Hence a translation is
needed.

John

 

[Steve House]

Didn't mean to step on any toes and I'd love to see your translation
method - it would make a valuable addition to the FAQs if you'd be so
inclined. Just that alarm bells start to go off when I see people
starting to sound like they might be thinking of using Project for
accounting, financials, time & billing, payroll, personal calendaring,
etc, etc - I'm a big believer in using the right tool for the job and
Project (as well as similar PM packages) is an excellent tool for what
it's designed to do but it's lousy for other sorts of management
problems.