Have you ever used the Editable Periods portion of your Project Time settings?

The Editable Periods dropdown, lower right corner,  allows you to choose a specific time span of your project and lock those months so no further changes can be made.  This is a great technique for saving any historical data after you've completed reconciling those months.  For instance, if you have a three-year project (2020-2022) and you've just finished reconciling the data for 2020 you may want to lock that data so no other changes can be made to it.  If this isn't something you've considered before I recommend looking at these settings.  There is also a great write-up of all the functions in the Project Time Settings on our Apptio Community pages.

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Justin Kean
Apptio
Instructor
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#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)

I was aware of this feature, but need to go back and revisit what our settings are. I know we got rid of 2019 recently, but don't know how we did it, exactly.

Some recurring data uploads are posted into the initial time period. If you close "all" prior time periods, you could block yourself/Datalink from uploading into the desired period.

In our case of locking the previous fiscal year, we versioned all tables effective start of the new fiscal year and, where needed, adjusted Datalink connectors to target the starting period of the new fiscal year instead of the initial period of the CT project.

Last year, we tried resetting the initial time of the CT project, but it caused more headache than versioning everything as mentioned above.

Versioning and adjusting Datalink took approximately three solid (very boring) work days....for a CT project that's a little more than 3 years old.

I strongly recommend closing periods combined with versioning as a best practice when transitioning to a new fiscal year.

I hadn't thought about that scenario, @Matt Temple. We mostly have ad-hoc updates, but I need to review that.
Versioning every table every year sounds like a huge undertaking.​
Once again, I wish we had better TBMA/admin-specific features.

Thanks for the update Matt!  Great follow up.

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Justin Kean
Apptio
Instructor
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-10-2021 14:06
From: Matt Temple
Subject: Locking Time Periods in Project Time Settings

Some recurring data uploads are posted into the initial time period. If you close "all" prior time periods, you could block yourself/Datalink from uploading into the desired period.

In our case of locking the previous fiscal year, we versioned all tables effective start of the new fiscal year and, where needed, adjusted Datalink connectors to target the starting period of the new fiscal year instead of the initial period of the CT project.

Last year, we tried resetting the initial time of the CT project, but it caused more headache than versioning everything as mentioned above.

Versioning and adjusting Datalink took approximately three solid (very boring) work days....for a CT project that's a little more than 3 years old.

I strongly recommend closing periods combined with versioning as a best practice when transitioning to a new fiscal year.

I came here looking for this exact discussion! @Matt Temple @Guillermo Cuadrado We've done a few different things over the years with mixed results so was hoping to find a pros & cons before committing.

​In mid-2020 we had a full change of the TBM guard so had our project copied. The old was maintained through the end of the year according to the old strategy and the new was full of the new strategy so was positioned as 'primary' going forward. A lot of effort for almost no reason in hindsight.  Literally no one uses it and it was only ever touched once or twice back in 2020 and I'm 99% sure we're going to have it deleted shortly.

I'd decided that at the top of 2023 we were going to version absolutely everything for a couple of reasons, most notable: new and better source data is available including attributes that can be leveraged for huge improvements in the allocation strategy. It's a real challenge to take all of the movement that has occurred from 1/1/2021 and continually try to patch up that old data so the new perspectives can be leveraged to deliver that improved state.

Field headers, Org points, Keys and metadata relationships have all changed so it made the most sense to me to essentially lock 21-22 by versioning everything. In the last 4 years the only requests I've heard of for YoY comparisons have been at the financial layer and folks can get that from the financial reporting systems.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-10-2021 14:06
From: Matt Temple
Subject: Locking Time Periods in Project Time Settings

Some recurring data uploads are posted into the initial time period. If you close "all" prior time periods, you could block yourself/Datalink from uploading into the desired period.

In our case of locking the previous fiscal year, we versioned all tables effective start of the new fiscal year and, where needed, adjusted Datalink connectors to target the starting period of the new fiscal year instead of the initial period of the CT project.

Last year, we tried resetting the initial time of the CT project, but it caused more headache than versioning everything as mentioned above.

Versioning and adjusting Datalink took approximately three solid (very boring) work days....for a CT project that's a little more than 3 years old.

I strongly recommend closing periods combined with versioning as a best practice when transitioning to a new fiscal year.

I had locked the 2019 and 2020 when we started the 2023 budget.  We keep 2 years of history so that we can compare Next year budget, current year budget, current year actuals annualized, last year actuals, and our qt3 Forecast for our custom budget reports. The CIO has now requested that we now compare Qt1 and Q12 Forecasts as well. I lock an additional year each time we start a budget.

The issue I just came across occurred we we set up Vendor Insights. It took some work but all of our invoice data was put in the beginning month of the project. We were trying to calculate the remaining PO. Invoices against that PO can occur in any month after the PO is created. This allowed us to match all invoices to to POs instead of matching the current month POs to the current month invoices. This took a little work to come up with the formulas to match all time periods, but Apptio figured it out.  In order to do this I had to make editable (unlock) the beginning of the project.

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KristineKleinTerex CorporationSr IT Operations Specialist
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