Financial Tracking and Reporting - within the Project

Introduction

Fluid has extensive financial functionality, which can be used to manage and report on project financials, at any level in the organisation, from supporting the project manager to stay on track, to providing full financial portfolio visibility to senior leadership.

In this article we will look at the in-depth project financials avaible within a single project.

This information is also available across the entire portfolio, using the Financial Dashboard - Full Project Financial View, where the information is available both in screen, and fully extractable to support your portfolio reporting needs. 

Note  - This article assumes a basic knowledge of Fluid Financials, however further articles to support Fluid's finance capabilities can be found here.

Project Financial Reporting

Within the Project Workspace, at the top of each project, you can see the Financial summaries as shown below. This view shows a project where funding, baseline, forecast and actuals have been populated, and so you can see the full project funding, and also the funding to date, against the actuals and forecast spend for the project.

The top boxed section relates to the full project life, and the second section relates to the current year view.

If you now click anywhere in the top sections, you will be navigated to the project financial report which include the following components:

• Multi year Financial Projection by Project
• Financials By Project

and if the Benefits and Ongoing Costs feature is turned on, you will also see the components for:

• Financial Projection
• Benefits
• Ongoing costs

Let's now look at each in turn, to understand the content, and further details which are available.

Multi Year Financial Projection by Project

This view gives a total view of the project, taking into account all years with planned, forecast or actuals activity, and gives a view of that planned and actuals spend against the approved funding. The capex and opex breakdown is also displayed if the capitalisation feature is turned on.

Note - For further information on how to use Capex in Fluid, please see here.

This high level financial health view of the project is further supported by the ability to drill down by year, and see that detail for each financial year. To do this, click on the Expanded View button, see image below.

In portfolio terms, this is an essential tool to both look back at previous years activities and allow the business to forecast into future years for approved projects underway, allowing the portfolio team to build future plans, taking into account those projects already in progress.

This view shows the detail (having scrolled to the right) of the last two years actuals and current and next year forecast activity. This view will show all the years of a project lifetime.

Financials By Project

In this view we can look at how any year of the project lifetime is performing, showing details of funding, baselines, actuals and forecast, with all variances, and with the capex opex breakdown also shown. 

The view defaults to the current fiscal year, with the ability to use the back/forward options to see any other year in the project life cycle, making this a go-to report for the project management and stakeholders to manage/review/take action on the project's financial performance. You can also see the monthly breakdown by clicking on the Show Months button.

Financial Projection

The reports above are focussed on project costs, however this following report will give you a full end-to-end project view, encompassing project one-time costs, (traditionally the focus of project managers) and the ongoing running costs of the project, combined with the financial benefits. 

This consolidated view is powerful in that it shows the true financial impact of a project to the organisation, and as such this report can be useful to the project managers and stakeholders to review on a regular basis.

This first view shows only the Project one-time costs.

This view shows the same project, however, with the additional information of the ongoing costs and benefits populated. This more comprehensive view, with the full financial impact of the project, clearly shows the value of using Fluid to demonstrate the fuller impact to the organisation.

If you use the Toggle Detail Rows function, this condenses the view to a single line, showing the summary impact to the organisation by year.

Benefits

Benefits can be classified to fit the organisation's categorisation, and are shown in the year they are expected to happen. Adding this information can be extremely useful when needing to make portfolio judgements and prioritisations. Having this data readily available at a project and at portfolio reporting level will add value to senior leadership discussions.

Ongoing costs

Often there will be longer term, ongoing costs to a project, once the intital project work is done. Having this information visible, combined with the business benefits, does enable senior leaders to guage the overall value and impact of projects.

In the Project view, Fluid reporting enables a quick way to see the detail of the ongoing expenses, in conjunction with the other financial aspects to the project

Summary

As you can see from the above views, this project functionaly allows full and detailed in-depth views of a project lifecycle, and is avaiable at any time to be visible within the tool, or exported to either Excel or pdf, to support any financial enquiry on the project.