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 Labor Tab: End date field weirdly effecting Summary tab

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  • ApptioPlanning(ITP/ITFMF)
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Rachel Pearson's profile image
Rachel Pearson posted Wed August 03, 2022 01:21 PM
On the Labor tab in IT Planning, you have the ability to enter start/end dates for each employee/line item. When an employee/line item has projections/allocations for months PAST the entered end date, it weirdly effects the values shown on the Summary tab.

For example, we have a multi-year forecast for FY2022-FY2024. On the Labor tab, Employee A has an end date of 6/1/22 but has a "1" HC entered for every month of the multi-year plan (all months in 2022, 2023, and 2024). When viewing Employee A on the Summary tab, this employee has positive dollar amounts for the months prior to the entered end date. After the end date of 6/1/22, the dollar amounts are negative and slowly getting larger (still negative) as the months continue through the end of the plan.

I understand the fix is to simply enter a "0" for all months after the designated end date on the Labor tab, but I am curious as to why the dollar amounts would be negating and increasing over time. Since the employee has an end date, I would assume any dollar amounts on the Summary tab would be $0 after the entered end date. Does anyone know why this is happening? If not caught, this could greatly effect a forecast/budget as we found an example of this which effected our forecast by over $300K for a single employee..

I have included some screenshots below of the effect this has on the summary tab if that helps to visualize what I am describing. Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

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Apptio Community Member's profile image
Apptio Community Member  Best Answer
Hi @Rachel Pearson,

We just went through this with Apptio so I think I have your answer.  The summary tab is based on the actuals loaded for every month that you have actuals for and then uses the labor tab to calculate the projections going forward (these come from the spend management tab).  You will need to enter a zero headcount for months after the end date that the employee is not there in the Labor tab.  ​You can double check it by looking at the spend management tab for those months.  Unfortunately, the spend management tab appears to be monthly so you have to select the months individually, and you cannot filter on columns (we found it easiest to export each month). 

One thing we found was that cost center managers were putting in the employees new rate for the baseline salary for the current year.  So we had to adjust all of our current year increases to be zero so we didn't overstate salaries.

I created the attached spreadsheet (with fake data) in order to replicate what Apptio was calculating and was able to arrive at the same amounts as the summary. ​
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Rene Norskov's profile image
Rene Norskov
@Rachel Pearson Just wanted to let you know that I have reached out to our IT Planning SME's - hopefully they can explain the idea behind this behaviour.​
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