Financial planning for Projects and Demands

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Financial planning for Projects and Demands

    This feature enables ServiceNow customers to plan, re-forecast, track financials, and create baselines for projects and demands. It provides a streamlined financials view, showing actual and planned expenses across the entire fiscal period. Users can monitor costs with detailed breakdowns, compare forecasts, and analyze variances efficiently within a single interface.

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    Key Features

    • Financial Forecasting: Enter high-level financial forecasts for planning items and work with planned operational (OpEx) and capital expenses (CapEx).
    • Cost Planning and Management: Create, edit, and delete cost plans and expense lines, including unplanned expenses, with in-line editing and side panel support.
    • Financial Rollups and Views: View rollups of planned costs, actual costs, and planned benefits in prioritization grids and financial screens with customizable widgets.
    • Re-forecasting: Update planned expenses for future fiscal periods directly from quarterly and yearly totals using in-line editing.
    • Labor Cost Generation: Automatically generate labor costs based on resource assignments and configured financial attributes.
    • Baseline Management: Create and compare financial baselines to track cost variances over time, analyzing when and why deviations occur.
    • Customizable Interface: Customize the left pane fields, personalize table columns, and switch display modes to focus on specific financial data.
    • Export Options: Export cost plans and baseline comparisons as Excel or CSV files for reporting and analysis.

    Key Outcomes

    • Gain comprehensive visibility into actual and planned financials for projects and demands across fiscal periods.
    • Improve financial accuracy by enabling detailed cost breakdowns and real-time re-forecasting.
    • Enhance decision-making through baseline comparisons and variance analysis.
    • Streamline labor cost calculations aligned with resource assignments and organizational attributes.
    • Facilitate easier financial tracking and reporting with customizable views and export capabilities.

    Plan, re-forecast, track the financials, and create baselines for projects and demands.

    The financials view provides a streamlined perspective, showcasing the actual and planned expenses for the entire fiscal period. You can view the latest estimated cost of completion by displaying the Actual costs for the past fiscal periods, planned costs for the current and future fiscal periods, the totals for quarter, year, and total duration of work.

    The interface gives you the ability to create cost plans, expense lines, and baselines. As a project manager or a financial user, you can:
    • Enter high-level financial forecasts for planning items using the simple financials section in the Details tab.
    • Work on high-level estimating for Planned opEx and Planned capEx.
    • Create a detailed breakdown of the planned costs using the financials tab.
    • View the rollups of Planned costs, Actuals costs, and Planned benefits for all of your planning items in the Prioritization grid.
    • Add, edit, or delete cost plans effortlessly from the Cost screen.
    • Re-forecast your planned expenses using the in-line editing feature.
    • View a streamlined perspective, showcasing your actual costs for the past and planned expenses for the future, for the entire time scope of the planning item.
    • Get a better comprehensive solution by viewing the Forecast (previously EAC - Estimate at Completion), Remaining Estimates (previously ETC - Estimate to Completion), and Actuals of each cost plan for the total time scope and the yearly breakdowns.
    • Re-forecast the planned cost for future fiscal periods by directly updating the quarterly and yearly totals using the in-line editing capability of the grid.
    • Generate labor costs depending on the resource assignments for the entire scope of the planning item broken down by the financial attributes configured for your organization. For more information on the planning attributes for attribute-based mapping, see Planning attributes.
    • Add or edit expense lines against the cost plans easily from the side panel with the associated cost plan details pre-populated.
    • Record unplanned expenses using the New expense line side panel.
    • Create and compare financial baseline to track the financials of your planning items.
    • Compare the latest costs (actual expenses for past fiscal periods and planned costs for current and future fiscal periods) with the initial forecasted planned costs by creating financial baseline and using the compare baselines capability.
    • Analyze the cause of variance in costs and when did this occur over time by capturing the financial baselines manually or automatically.
    Financials screen.
    You can view the following information on the financials screen.
    • Time scope: duration of the planning item or a cost plan, whichever has a larger fiscal period range.
    • Functional currency: currency defined and used to calculate the financials.
    • Customizable widgets showing different financial information such as allocated budget, Forecast (previously EAC - Estimate at Completion), Variance (the difference between budget and Forecast), breakdown of planned costs, and actuals by cost type.
      Note:
      Budget and Budget vs EAC Variance widgets are available for Demands and Projects only.
    • Time scale: time period breakdowns to view the financials. Default value is set to Month/Period, depending on the fiscal calendar type.
    • Display mode: list options to switch between different modes to get a focused view of financials.
    • Generate labor costs: one-click solution to generate or refresh the planned labor costs for the planning item depending on resource assignments.
      Note:
      This option is enabled for the projects with resource assignments only.
    • The pane gives you a tabulated view of the cost plan attributes displaying the Name, Cost type, Expense type, Stat fiscal period, End fiscal period, Total planned cost, Employee type, and Role. You can customize these fields. For more information, see Customize the left pane view for financials.
    • In the right pane, you can view the total Actuals, Forecast, and Remaining Estimates for the selected Time scope duration. Actual expenses against a cost plan for the past fiscal periods, Actuals, Forecast, and Remaining Estimates for the current fiscal year, and planned costs for the current and future fiscal periods.
      Note:
      The header rows of actuals and planned are color-coded differently to help you easily identify and differentiate between the expense types.
    • New cost plan: opens a simplified side-panel to create a new cost plan for the entity.
    • Personalize option to customize the columns in the left pane of the table.
    • Export option to download Cost or Baselines comparison as Microsoft Excel or CSV file.