Reviewing your Project Financials

With Forecast, project accounting becomes easy and flexible to suit your needs. The platform collects and combines all your project data to generate a project budget that lets you monitor the cost, revenue, and profit. This provides project managers or financial controllers with the transparency needed into the project financials to monitor billability & profitability in a matter of seconds.

This article covers

Overview of the Financials page
Reviewing your Financials Overview Details
Reviewing your Tasks Breakdown
Reviewing your Rates & Internal Costs
Reviewing your Expenses

Overview of the Financials page

Quick Access: Click on Projects > All Projects > Financials.

Only Admins, Controllers, and Managers can view the Financials page of a project by default. Coordinators and collaborators will not be able to view the page and Managers will only be able to view the revenue information.

Financials Overview is the financial hub of any project in Forecast. Within it, it is possible to review all the financial information necessary to stay on top of a project's budget and deliver it without any financial backlashes.

To assist with this objective, Financials Overview provides multiple and diverse pages that cover all necessary financial information. Below, the article covers all of these pages, starting with the Overview, then Task Breakdown, Rates and Internal Cost and Expenses. There is an additional page, Revenue Recognition. You can read more about Revenue Recognition in our article, Understanding and using Revenue Recognition.

Reviewing your Financials Overview Details

Below the project totals and revenue recognition tables, users will find the Details table displaying financial information across Actuals, Plan, Forecasted to complete, and Total at completion. The data in each category is grouped by Billable time and Expenses, Cost, and Profit. All tables are further expandable into phases and roles, allowing for a more granular view of the project financials.

The flexibility in the budget's granularity allows project managers to display as much and as little financial data as needed, allowing them to track the budget at a holistic or granular level.

Just like in the chart section of the budget data, you can choose to group the financial information either by months or days - depending on the current duration of your project.

Users can also opt to focus on specific parts of the project financials, namely on Time & Expenses, Expense Details, and Invoice Plan.

Time & Expenses - displays the work and also factors in billable expenses.
Expense Details - displays the expense items in their respective Phases and dates. To read more about adding an expense item, take a look at Submitting your expenses.
Invoice Plan - displays invoiced items. To read more about creating an invoice, take a look at Creating invoices for your customers.

Money view

Scrolling past project totals are the Project Details, which display the financial information across Actuals, Plan, Remaining, and Forecast. Each of these categories is further broken down into Billable Time and Expenses, Cost, and Profit. Hovering over each will trigger a tooltip informing the user about the calculation used to get the displayed amount.

Planned
- Billable Time and Expenses: all billable estimate hours x role rate + price on all planned expenses.
- Cost: task estimate x internal cost + cost on all planned expenses.
- Profit: planned billable time x planned cost.
Actual
- Billable Time and Expenses: all billable time registrations x role rate + price on all planned past expenses.
- Cost: all time registrations x internal cost + cost on past expenses.
- Profit: actual billable time and expenses spent to date + actual cost.
Forecast to complete
- Billable Time and Expenses: all remaining billable hours x role rate + price on future expenses.
- Cost: remaining task estimate x internal cost + cost on planned future expenses.
- Profit: forecast billable time and expenses to complete + forecast cost to complete.
Total at completion
- Billable Time and Expenses: actual billable time and expenses spent to date + forecast billable time and expenses to complete.
- Cost: actuals cost + forecast cost to complete.
- Profit: total billable time at completion + total cost at completion.

All tables are expandable and break down the financial information by:

Phase
Role

The flexibility on the budget's granularity allows project managers to display as much and as little financial data as needed, allowing for the tracking of the project budget at a holistic or granular level.

Similarly to the chart section of the budget, financial information under the time view can be grouped either by months or days - depending on the duration of the project.

Time view

Project Details under 'Time View' display time across Actuals, Plan, Remaining, and Forecast. All of these can be shown or hidden with the eye icon.

Within the time view, the budget details are split up into four(4) different groups. Hovering over each will trigger a tooltip informing the user about the calculation used to get the displayed amount. The groups are as follows:

Actual: all time registrations.
Planned: total estimated hours.
Remaining: all remaining hours.
Forecast: actuals + remaining.

All tables are expandable and break down the financial information by:

Phase
Role

Similarly to the chart section of the budget, financial information under the time view can be grouped either by months or days - depending on the duration of the project.

Reviewing your Tasks Breakdown

Tasks Breakdown is a listing of all tasks within the project, their current status, the progress completion %, associated revenue recognition values and more. Add or remove columns from the show/hide Eye menu to customize the table to fit your needs and show the data you may need to review. You can also filter or group the project's tasks which can also be helpful when looking to review tasks and how they are progressing over the course of the project.

Reviewing your Rates & Internal Costs (Pro and Plus only)

Rates & Internal Costs shows all of the roles and their rates that are associated with the project in question as well as team members assigned to the project and their internal hourly cost. The page has two sections 'Team Members missing internal hourly cost' and 'Team Members'.

Team Members missing internal hourly cost

This section shows you the project's team members who do not have an internal hourly cost associated with their individual user profile. You will see Team Member name, Project Role and Internal Hourly Cost. In this section, all internal hourly cost values will be 0.00 which is a good indication to review your team members' profile information and update to add their internal rate.

Clicking the 0.00 opens the Internal Costs Period modal where you can update the internal hourly rate for the team member.

Note: Please note that you cannot change the rates of each role from this tab.

Team Members

The second section shows team members. From this section, it is possible to view the team members assigned to the project as well as their role and their internal hourly cost.

Clicking on the Internal Hourly Cost value for a team member opens the Internal cost periods modal where you can adjust or version the internal rate associated with the this team member.

Please be advised that updating internal hourly rates affects that team member's internal hourly cost for all projects and not just the one you are changing it from.

See About Internal Hourly Cost and how it works for further information.

Reviewing your Financials Expenses (Pro and Plus only)

Expenses is the final page available on for the project's Financials and it is completely focused on any expenses that have been created for the project. To learn how to create expense categories, see Defining your expense categories.

Its objective is twofold; it primarily serves as a hub where expense totals can be reviewed but it also serves as a page where new expenses may be added. The page is separated into two sections.

Expense Totals

At the top of the page, it is possible to review the total revenue, cost, and profit of expenses that have been accumulated for that project. Moreover, the New Expense button resides here. To learn how to create and submit expenses, see Submitting your expenses.

Approved/Unapproved Expenses

The second section, below the totals, shows which expenses have been approved or are still unapproved as well as several pieces of information about each expense such as the person who submitted it, the total cost, and whether or not it is a planned expense.

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Overview of the Financials page