We’re keen to understand whether anyone else has experienced the same issues we have with financial tracking and how these have been overcome (within Planview or through other solutions) - please share your experiences below!
We’ve been running Portfolios for 18 months now and one of the greatest omissions from our config and subsequently one of the biggest areas of feedback and pain points for our PM community was a solution to manage transactional level financial planning and tracking within Planview, forcing the active ‘source of truth’ back on to spreadsheets and creating duplication, rather than simplification. Let me explain!
In Portfolios, our Finance Details screen has been set up to reflect our corporate financial accounting structure. This is great - each month we can upload the actuals directly from the General Ledger and into Planview with no manipulation and can reconcile transactional level costs back to (overly complex) GL reports as required. BUT holding forecasts and Actuals at an Account or even sub-account level doesn’t help with financial planning or easy reconciliation. Take the following example:
I have contracts with 3 companies - A, B and C. Each company has 4 active statements of work they could bill against. Each SOW has a value of £100k. Over the course of the year I know that the sum of the SOWs will be 3 * 4 * £100k = £1,200k
Given these companies are all providing similar services (let say IT Consultancy), the £1,200k will be held in PV against a single financial account. I can include notes against this account line but I can’t profile out the forecast cost per Company or per SOW
When the Actuals feed comes in with a £250k value, I can see this total in PV against the Account, but I don’t know if this is for 1 SOW or many, or more than on of the 3 companies. I can’t tell whether finances for any given company or SOW are on track or need profiling so resort to unpicking the detail from the GL reports and maintaining a master list of finances on a spreadsheet and periodically copying up the latest forecasts, if I have time or remember because at the end of the day, this process is no a non-value overhead which isn’t helping me to deliver my project!
The ‘solution’ to the above could be to allow the PM to enter multiple transactional level accounts, one for each SOW so 12 in total. But these would have the same account numbers so capability isn’t supported in Portfolios, and even if it was, it would be challenging to accurately reconcile each line back to Actuals feed (some capability to capture a contract number and SOW reference would be needed in this instance, but not in every scenario)
Now we have plenty of examples of this and given we were to be using Planview as a single source of truth, this has become a serious challenge. Asking PMs to maintain a transactional level forecast isn’t unusual in my experience and essential for more complex projects to ensure diligent financial management so we were somewhat surprised when Portfolios just couldn’t accommodate this. We’ve looked at changing out accounting structure but the underlying Portfolios financial details constraints problems remain.
We’ve been led to believe that we are ‘unique’ in having this kind of problem - in 25 years of Project Management I find that very hard to accept. We’d be very keen to hear if you’ve experienced the same challenge and how you are tackling this issue, whether within Planview or elsewhere!