Most reporting in Cost Transparency is Current Year and/or Year-to-Date format. I am curious how others utilize CT to track their project financials, especially on multi-year projects? Are you creating custom reports to give you the data you want, or are you configuring out-ot-the-box (OOTB) reports to satisfy your needs?

Likely this will also lead to how you understand your budgeting? Are you strict on one year at a time, or do you understand your budget more holistically and allow unused budget from one year to carry into the next?

When completing metrics within Apptio, or outside of the tool, and presenting to leadership and stakeholders, do you measure on the current year financial health or do you consider the entire project timeframe?

Interested to hear your thoughts and experiences! Thank you!!

Christian,

This is an area I wish Apptio focused more on.  A lot of customer have multiple years in the tool, but OOTB reporting has not kept up. 

We did have to create custom reports to fit our need to show both past years and as well as future years.  This has not come without challenges.  Most notably when something you are tracking in the past no longer exist in the current year (e.g. services).  In the past, this has caused the prior year data to be incomplete.  I'd have to look into how we solved this issue.

Another challenge area is in charts and trying to display multi year and multi metrics (e.g. budget vs forecast).  There's no way to pick which year you want applied to which metric.  So if you the time feature in reporting, if reporting both years for each metric.  The example that makes this a problem is trend analysis.  If you have a year of actual that you want to pair with forecast data from current year or next, then there's no a simple way to do this.

We have to take advantage of using formulas in reports to compare last year actual/cost to this year forecast within tables.

Hopefully this will help you keep an eye out when trying to build your own reports.

Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey, thanks for your experience! Same here; we created our own reports to track both all year and current year financials for projects. In our cases, when projects ended we still had to retain project info in our uploads. While not a real hassle, it does require a lot of alignment across many files.

And I find your second point quite interesting. An area we are beginning to explore is trend and burn rate, so your mention of past actuals vs. planned forecast is intriguing.

We have a second project in our Apptio instance that is used for Ad-hoc reporting.  To assist project managers and leaders with multi-year capital projects, we created a report to display budgets, PO totals, and Invoiced totals by project code and FY.  We are currently adding  FY21 data but this screenshot of the column headers may provide an idea for your situation.  

Finance leadership makes the year end decisions, so we rely on capital budget reports, procurement system data, and AP reports to provide this quick glance for project managers.  They can also drill down on Committed and Invoiced totals to view details if needed.   Hope this helps.

Hi Julie, thanks for much for your insight! I do serve as the 'link' that bridges our Procurement team with our IT Project Management Office, so what you mention is something that I will definitely look into. It may be helpful for our project teams to see this type of info.

Hi Christian, I've worked with customers to create some custom reports that show trends over past time periods (trailing 12 months, trailing 8 quarters, etc). This works best with tables and line charts. You can do this using the Time Period Range feature like so:

Select the interval you want to measure from the "Time" section of the project explorer window and drag it to the "columns" section of a report component.

Right click the time interval and select the "range" option.

Change the range to show prior periods.

Note: Apptio will always display the current period regardless of the time period range you select. 

Note 2: Once you add a time period into the "columns" section of the component configurator, you will not be able to add in other fields to the "rows" or "values" section. I recommend adding the time period(s) you want to see as one of the last steps when building a chart or table on a report.

Hope that helps!

Thanks so much, Allen! I will definitely keep these tips in mind as we move along on our reporting.