Charge Projections

Charge projection options provide forecasting of financials within OpenAir. Report values in Summary reports called “Projected xxx” are populated based on the charge projection settings. Charge projections are based on information from the project details and the billing rules set on the project.

The Settings you select are determined by the process by which you allocate resources to a project. Accurate resource allocation provides reliable financial forecasting. If you are not using the Resources application, then the booked hours options do not display in the charge projection selections.

You can run charge projections for a specific time frame by defining a start and end date. Any Projected xxx values prior to the start date of projections are zero. Charge projections may be run for both billing or billing and recognition by selecting the Create recognition projections option. You can also run projections on a relative date range such as from Today forward X number of days.

Note:

The following features affect charge projections settings. To enable these features, contact OpenAir Customer Support.

Allow charge projections to be run for individual projects — adds a Run charge projections link to the Tips section on each project Properties form. Charge projections will be run using the criteria set in Administration > Projects Settings > Charge Projections.
Do not used booked or assigned hours before today when running charge projections using approved/worked and booked/assigned — ignores booked/assigned hours in the past regardless of whether time has been entered on a timesheet for approved/worked charge projections.
Exclude Project from Charge Projections – When enabled, you can control whether to exclude a project from charge and revenue projections from the project properties form. See Exclude Project from Charge Projections

To access and modify Charge Projections, go to Administration > Application Settings > Projects > Charge projections.

Access and modify charge projections form.

Status

The Status section of the Charge projections form shows when the last global and project charge and recognition projections were run, or if they are currently running (see Run charge projections).

Settings

You can set the following Charge Projections settings in the Charge projections form:

Assigned hours — hours are taken from the number of hours each user is assigned to the project.

Important:
Assignments are different from bookings, and this setting only applies assignments to projects.
Booked hours — hours are taken from user bookings, based on the bookings setup in the Resources module.

Important:
As with Assigned hours, bookings are different from assignments, so this setting only applies bookings to projects.
Approved hours — hours from timesheets which have been approved.
Worked hours — hours which users have logged to the project on a timesheet, which may not have been approved.
Approved and booked hours — for each user, approved hours are used until the last date of approved hours, and then booked hours are used. If no approved hours exist, only booked hours are used.
Approved and assigned hours — for each user, approved hours are used until the last date of approved hours, and then assigned hours are used. If no approved hours exist, only assigned hours are used.
Worked and booked hours — for each user, worked hours are used until the last date of worked hours, and then booked hours are used. If no worked hours exist, only booked hours are used.
Worked and assigned hours — for each user, worked hours are used until the last date of worked hours, and then assigned hours are used. If no worked hours exist, only assigned hours are used.

Projections filter

You can limit global charge projections to project in selected project stages and limit the process to currently active projects. By default, inactive projects are excluded from projections, so no values are generated for them when these are run.

To run projections for inactive projects, check the Include inactive projects box in the Projections filter form.

To run projections only for projects in selected project stages, click > Create or > Edit, and select the project stages.

Note:

Setting filters for global charge projections can reduce the number of generated entries and improve performance. The projections filter only applies when global projections run. It is ignored when projections are generated for a single project in the project properties form.

Date range

Project charge projections are flexible. You can define an absolute date range by entering specific start and end dates or define a relative date range by selecting a start date and a entering a duration in days. Projections are then generated for the range you specified.

The default display includes specific Start and End dates. To select a relative range, click the relative link in the Date range description. This changes the entry fields to Start and Duration. Then, select your start time and enter the exact number of days in the Duration field. To return to an absolute range display, click the absolute link in the Date range description.

Note:

Setting a date range for global charge projections can reduce the number of generated entries and improve performance. Longer date ranges increase the amount of data which must be processed, which increase the length of time it takes to run projections.

The date range only applies when global projections run. It is ignored when projections are generated for a single project in the project properties form.

Run charge projections

In this section of the Charge Projections form, you can choose to manually run a charge projection now or activate forecasting by setting up automatic charge projections. Whenever projections are run, data on hours and money which would be generated from billing or recognition rules are updated based on current bookings, assignments, timesheet hours, billing rules, and recognition rules.

Important:

Billing rules are required to create charge projections. Ensure you have created billing rules for Customers : Projects.

To run global charge projections manually:

By default, selecting Run charge projections now generates global charge projections for all projects.

Select Run charge projections now and click Save.

To run charge projections manually for a specific project:

Open the project you want a charge projection for.
Go to the project’s Properties section and click the Tips button on the left side of the screen.
Select Generate charge projections for this project.

Note:

Project-specific charge projections cannot be created while global projections are running.

To set projections to run automatically:

Select Automatically run the charge projections.
Select the day, hour, and minute when the charge projection should run. All times are in U.S. Eastern Time.
Click Save.

It is important to run the charge projections and refresh the form to make sure that the projections completed before using the corresponding forecasting reports. To check when charge projections were last run, go to Administration > Application Settings > Projects > Charge Projections > Status (see Status). If a charge projection is currently running, “Global charge projections and recognition projections are currently running” will appear in the Status section of the Charge projections form.

Charge Projections Reporting

Charge Projections Summary Reports

When you have set up billing rules and charge projections options, you can use their corresponding reporting values in summary reports. Examples of commonly-used summary reports for charges based on current settings include:

[Account-wide] — Projects
[Account-wide] — Company
[Account-wide] — Customers

To set up the time range used in the reports, configure the Period size, Number of periods, and Date fields.

Charge projections summary reports form.

Then, choose the corresponding fields which should be calculated in the report. The following are examples of common fields in this type of report:

Projects — Projected cost [loaded cost type] [rules] — takes hours from charge projections which were generated using billing rules, with the corresponding loaded cost type applied. Field type: money
Projects — Projected billable hours [rules] — hours from charge projections which were generated using billing rules. Field type: hours
Projects — Projected billing [rules] — money from charge projections which were generated using billing rules. Field type: money
Projects — Projected billing margin cost [loaded cost type] [rules] — money from charge projections minus the hours from charge projections times the hourly loaded cost. Field type: money

Charge Projections Detail Reports

In addition to the Charge Projections Summary Reporting, you can use an additional detail report: Projects — Charge projections. This report is for projected charges based on a project’s billing rules. You could use this report to get projections per transaction and filter it depending on the information you need.

You can set your desired date range, and set up conversions on different bases in Forex conversions and User loaded cost determination (click the Settings tab if using the Report Manager and Editor optional feature). Any report value which requires a foreign exchange conversion will use that date as the exchange rate date. This date will also dictate the date used for the currency conversion of user-loaded costs for any cost reporting value.