P6 Professional enables you to define your organization's global financial period calendars in the Financial Period Calendars dialog box. Customized financial periods provide more accurate display and reporting of actual units and costs. Rather than spreading costs evenly throughout the length of a project, users can view how actual costs were incurred by customized financial period.
If your organization always updates the schedule according to the same time interval (for example, every week, every month, every quarter, etc.), you can quickly create a calendar and add a batch of financial periods to it. If the schedule may be updated irregularly, you can create a single financial period for any financial period calendar at any time.
When financial period calendars exist, users can store period performance for any defined period of the financial period calendar assigned to the project. When you store period performance, actual units and costs are stored as past period actuals. The past period actual values can be edited for any financial period in columns of the Activity Table and Activity Details, Resources tab. Past period actual spreads per financial period can be viewed in the Activity Usage Spreadsheet and Resource Usage Spreadsheet, and past period actual data can be displayed in profiles, time-distributed reports, and the Tracking view.
Tip:
- To ensure that data is displayed correctly in financial period timescale intervals in P6 Professional, activity and resource data must be summarized by financial period. To summarize project data by financial period, choose Admin, Preferences, then select the Options tab. In the 'Select summarization periods' section, choose the 'By financial period' option; for each project, data will be stored in financial period intervals the next time you summarize the project.