Introduction to Project Financials

Modified on Sun, 23 Feb at 4:59 PM

Fluid Financials provides real-time insights into project costs, ensuring financial transparency and control. It enables organisations to track funding, expenditure, capitalisation, and benefits with accuracy. By integrating forecasting and actual cost tracking, Fluid facilitates data-driven decision-making, ensuring financial alignment with project objectives.

Effective financial management is critical for maintaining project budgets, optimising resources, and ensuring accountability. Without accurate tracking, projects risk overspending, underfunding, or inefficient allocation of resources. A structured financial approach supports strategic planning, enabling organisations to forecast financial needs, justify funding, and measure return on investment. Fluid streamlines these processes by consolidating financial data in one platform, enhancing reporting and governance.

The following sections outline the key financial components tracked in Fluid, the financial controls available, and the reporting tools that support financial transparency.

Please note that only users who have the Financial Access role set up on their user records can access financials.

Key Financial Components Tracked in Fluid

Project Funding

Project funding represents the financial resources allocated to a project, covering initial budgets, approved funding changes, and external investment sources. Fluid allows organisations to track the total cost of a project against its available funding, providing clear visibility into financial health. By continuously monitoring financial commitments, organisations can ensure that projects remain within budget and are sufficiently resourced from inception to completion. If a project is underspending, budget allocations can be adjusted and redistributed to other initiatives, maximising overall portfolio efficiency and ensuring optimal use of available funds.

Non-Resource Costs

Non-resource costs include all project-related expenses that are not tied to human resources, such as software licenses, hardware, travel, and operational expenses. Fluid enables organisations to forecast these costs based on planned spending and compare them with actuals as they are incurred. Actuals for non-resource costs can be uploaded from ERP systems or general ledgers to streamline cost actualisation, ensuring consistency between project financials and corporate accounting.

Resource Costs

Labour costs represent a significant portion of project expenses. Forecasting is based on rate cards and expected effort, ensuring accurate budgeting and financial planning. To track actual costs, built-in timesheet functionality allows users to log hours worked against specific projects. This enables a direct comparison between forecasts and actuals, helping to monitor variances and maintain financial control. By capturing timesheet data within the system, organisations can enhance financial reporting and optimise resource allocation without relying on external tools.

Capitalisation and Amortisation

Capital expenditure tracking ensures that costs are correctly classified as either operational or capital investments. Proper capitalisation is essential for financial compliance, long-term asset management, and accurate profit and loss reporting. It helps organisations distinguish between expenses that provide immediate value and those that contribute to future growth, ensuring alignment with accounting standards.

In addition to capitalisation, amortisation plays a key role in financial planning. Capitalised costs are typically amortised over their useful life, spreading expenses across multiple reporting periods rather than recognising them all at once. This approach ensures that financial statements accurately reflect the ongoing value of capital investments and their impact on profitability.

Fluid allows organisations to manage both capitalisation rules and amortisation processes, ensuring consistency in financial reporting and supporting strategic investment decisions. By tracking capital costs and their amortisation schedules, organisations can maintain a clear audit trail and align financial reporting with corporate and regulatory requirements.

Benefits and Ongoing Costs

Beyond initial investments, projects are expected to deliver value, whether through cost savings, revenue generation, efficiency improvements, or strategic advantages. Benefits can be quantitative, such as increased revenue or reduced operational costs, or qualitative, such as improved customer satisfaction or enhanced compliance. Most projects should contribute positively in some form, and tracking these benefits ensures alignment with business objectives.

At the same time, projects often introduce ongoing costs, including maintenance, support, licensing, and operational expenses. Proper tracking of these recurring costs ensures that financial planning remains accurate and sustainable over time. By managing both benefits and ongoing costs, organisations can assess the true return on investment and make informed decisions about future funding and resource allocation.

Financial Controls

Fluid provides structured financial lockdown mechanisms to ensure data integrity and accurate financial reporting. These controls prevent unintended changes to historical data while allowing adjustments within defined financial periods.

One of the key financial controls is the Financial Month Lock, which is used during month-end processing. When a financial period is closed, forecasts for that period are locked and are no longer included in the full-year forecast. Instead, actuals replace forecasts, ensuring that financial reporting reflects real project costs. While forecasts remain fixed, adjustments to actuals can still be made under controlled conditions to ensure reporting accuracy. This process ensures that financial reporting remains accurate while allowing flexibility for corrections.

Alongside the Financial Month Lock, Fluid also provides the Capitalisation Lock and Timesheet Lock. The Capitalisation Lock defines the cut-off point for capitalisation calculations, ensuring that only relevant financial data is included while protecting historical records. The Timesheet Lock prevents changes to time-recorded costs once finalised, ensuring consistency in resource cost reporting.

By implementing these structured financial controls, organisations can maintain a clear audit trail, ensure compliance with financial policies, and support accurate budget tracking across projects and portfolios.

Reporting and Analysis

Fluid Financials provides powerful reporting capabilities to support financial analysis and informed decision-making. These tools offer real-time visibility into project financials, ensuring transparency and accountability across the portfolio.

Key reporting tools include:

Financial Dashboards – Real-time insights into project financial performance, allowing teams to monitor budgets, actuals, and variances.
Export to Excel – Enables further analysis by extracting financial data for custom reporting and external reviews.
Project Financials Workspace & Financial Report Page – Each project has a dedicated financial section within its workspace, providing an overview of budgets, forecasts, and actuals. Additionally, the Financial Report Page offers a more detailed breakdown of project financials, ensuring teams have access to deeper analysis and reporting.

These reporting capabilities help organisations maintain financial control, ensuring projects stay within budget and deliver the expected business outcomes. By leveraging these insights, teams can make data-driven decisions, track financial performance, and optimise resource allocation effectively.

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