Hi. In this video, I will show you how to read the Summary page in IT Planning.

The Summary page provides interactive analytics to help you understand your budget and how it is tracking to key metrics or targets that you establish. It gives you various views to help you understand how your budget breaks down by financial categories and dimensions, how it breaks down by organizational structure, and how it compares to other plans or versions by providing a breakdown of the differences between them.

Let's take a closer look at each of these.

I can click the Show Delegated Costs checkbox to show or hide delegated project costs that originate in a project but end up in a Department budget or, if enabled, a Service budget.

Using the Set Filter button, I can set filters to limit the data displayed in the charts on the Summary page. I can also filter to view the data by OPEX and CAPEX category. I can filter the view by department, cost center or other data dimensions to show a proportional breakdown of the budget.

The heatmap or treemap chart displays a proportional representation of the grouping values per the selected group.

I can click an area in the heatmap chart to display time-phased data for all groupings or a selected grouping in the stacked column chart. I can then select a specific point or an actual data point in the stacked column chart and drill in to see those line items in that specific month or select the Quarters or Years option to display the line items for a quarter or a year. Note that the actuals trend line is only available when I view the data by months. I can do further analysis by grouping to get subtotals by cost center and sorting to show which cost center is spending the most in this specific period.

Below the stacked column chart, I can drag the start and end handles on the time period slider bar for the date range I want displayed in the stacked column chart.

The summary page facilitates quick identification of outliers along with the ability to further slice and drill to get to the underlying details. For example, I’m able to view my budget composition by interesting information such as Account... and Location.... I’m also able to slice by more complex dimensions like Vendor, which has attributes like Parent, Name, and Category. By selecting a specific category like Software, I can filter the stacked column chart to show just the Software spend over time. Then by selecting a specific point in the stacked column chart, I can drill in to see just those line items in that specific month. I can do further analysis by grouping to get subtotals by cost center and sorting to show which cost center is spending the most in this specific period.

I can click Flip Comparison to reverse the heatmap and waterfall chart comparison order and color to show the appropriate over/under analysis for the heatmap and waterfall charts. The waterfall chart uses the same colors as the heatmap chart to show the over/under analysis information.

With the budget comparison waterfall, I’m able to compare my current plan to any other plan in the system... or to targets and actuals, if they have been set or uploaded. I can visualize the differences using the same budgetary dimensions used before. I can drill into a department and further down to any of its cost centers, to see the puts and takes at the individual cost center level. Drilling in further I’m able to see variances at the line items level. Organizing and sorting this further I’m able to identify the main drivers behind this variance.

Finally, I can adjust the Summary page layout by selecting either of the labels in the upper right corner of the page.

In this video, you have seen what information you can glean from the Summary page in IT Planning. Thanks for watching!