How Financial Project Plan Baseline is Set

As a project manager, when you update resources, add tasks, or modify task dates, a baseline can be set for your financial project plan. Each time a baseline is set, baseline information is overwritten by the current planned values.

You can set a baseline for tasks using the Manage Financial Project Plan page. If you add new tasks or change existing tasks in a project plan that already has a baseline, you can select those tasks and set a baseline for them without affecting the rest of the project plan.

When a financial project plan is set to baseline, you can optionally choose to generate a budget and set it to baseline status as well.

Caution: You can't set a baseline if the financial project plan has errors.

Settings That Affect Baseline Creation

When you set a baseline for your financial project plan, the application copies planned amounts as baseline amounts without changes.

If you select to automatically roll up planned dates for tasks, the application copies subtask and summary task planned dates without change, as baseline dates. However, if planned dates aren't automatically rolled up the task hierarchy, then summary task dates may not match the dates of their earliest and latest subtasks. To avoid a mismatch, the application revises the planned dates for summary tasks based on subtask dates.

For example, consider the planned dates in the following task structure:

Task 1: January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010

Task 1.1: January 1, 2010 to February 28, 2010
Task 1.2: March 1, 2010 to March 31, 2010

When you set a baseline for the financial project plan, the planned finish date for Task 1 changes from December 31, 2010 to March 31, 2010 before being copied as the baseline finish date.

Note: When setting a baseline for your financial project plan, project start and end dates don't change because project dates can be beyond the dates for the earliest and latest top task dates.

How a Project Plan Baseline Is Set

When you set a baseline for your financial project plan, the application saves the following current planned values as baseline information at the task and task assignment level:

Planned dates
Quantity or effort
Raw and burdened cost in transaction currency, project currency, and project ledger currency
Average standard raw and burdened cost rates for the task assignment
Standard raw and burdened cost rates for each period