Is there a function I can use to calculate the total cost of a project that spans multiple years?

I can get this year's cost easily.  I can get all of last year's cost easily.  I'm pretty sure I can even get 2 year's ago cost by combining TimePeriod and Annual.  I suppose I could string all of this together to get a project's cost that has been active for 3 years, but what about a project that's been active for 5 years?  Do I just need to keep stringing a bunch of TimePeriod and Annual functions together to get the total project's actual cost since it started?  What I'd really like is a ProjectToDate function; and ideally it wouldn't need me to tell it when the project started - it would be able to figure that out dynamically for each project.  Does this or something like it exist anywhere?

I may have found somewhat of an answer to this, although I'm not able to get it to work at this point.  It looks like the Annual function is the one I want.  There is a delta argument that I can use to look forwards or backwards in time.

So if my metrics name is Project, then the formula =Annual(Project,-5) will look back over the past 5 years and get the total cost.

There's two catches I'm running into here:

1. It only looks back in time, and not at the current year, so in order to get the correct full amount the formula needs to be =Project+Annual(Project,-5).  This gives you current year plus previous 5 years.
2. You can't just put a huge number in as the delta parameter in order to capture costs as far back as reasonably expected.  If your time settings only go back to the beginning of 2013, then (in 2016) you can only put in -3.  Anything bigger than that will break the formula.  Which would mean you might need to update your formula every year.  There may be a way to calculate this number dynamically so it always goes back to the beginning of your Apptio Project, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

But as I said, I'm not getting this to work as of right now.  Looking at one specific project that I know has costs this year and last year, my =Project+Annual(Project,-5) formula is only giving me current year costs.  So I need to do a bit of digging... maybe my identifiers are messed up somewhere.

If a time period in FY2016 is currently selected at top center, then Annual(Project, -5) will return only the summed value of Project metric for all time periods in FY2011.

I think the best option despite the repetition is:

= Annual(Project, -5) + Annual(Project, -4) + Annual(Project, -3) + Annual(Project, -2) + Annual(Project, -1) + Annual(Project) + Annual(Project, 1) + Annual(Project, 2) + Annual(Project, 3) + Annual(Project, 4) + Annual(Project, 5)

The above example assumes your project spans six fiscal years.

Since we don't know which time period a user will have open when viewing the report, the formula accounts for all possibilities.

We can adjust the formula as needed if we have more or fewer fiscal years within the project.

That totally makes sense.  Thanks!  The repetition isn't very fun, but at least it accomplishes the goal.