We've updated Meisterplan - check out what's new!
- Financial Trackers, Actual Allocation Costs and Project Budget
- Compare Actuals in Integrated Reports
- Extension of the Quick Import for Actual Time Worked
Financial Trackers, Actual Allocation Costs and
Project BudgetProPremium
With Actuals, you can compare your project plans with the actual performance of your projects directly within Meisterplan to ensure success.
Our Actuals feature has been updated with Allocations Costs, Financial Trackers and additional internal reporting for Actuals. This allows you to compare the approved budget or actual allocation costs to the planned allocation costs.
Approved Budget
With the new Approved Budget field, you can determine how projects in your portfolio compare financially to the original budget approved for each project. Set the project budget for each project, for example, to compare it with the Cost Estimate at Completion based on planned financial events costs, planned allocation costs and actual allocation costs.
Learn more about the approved budget in the Approved Budget and Actual Allocation Costs article.
Actual Allocation Costs
Meisterplan calculates the Actual Allocation Costs of a project from the imported Actual Time Worked and the cost per hour set for a resource or role at the time of import.
Based on these values, you can compare planned costs to actual allocations costs, view the Cost Estimate at Completion and make sure the project is within its approved budget.
Learn more about Actual Allocation Costs in the Approved Budget and Actual Allocation Costs article.
How to Prepare Your Meisterplan System
Once the new features have been released, you need to configure user rights and the project settings to be able to try out the new functionality.
Required User Rights
- To display financial data, you need to have the Access Financial Data right
- To view Actual Allocation Costs in the Project List, Project Details and Board, you need to have at least the Read Only option under Access Actual Time Worked
- To access the Approved Budget field, you need to have at least Read Only rights under Project Field Rights.
In the Quick Import: Actual Time Worked article, you can learn which user rights are required to import Actual Time Worked as a basis for calculating actual allocation costs.
Calculations of Cost per Hour of Resources Is Possible
With this release, all users with the Access Financial Data right can draw conclusions about the Cost per Hour of a resource, even if they don't have access to the Resource Pool.
Configure the Project Settings
You need to have the Manage Project Fields, Project Settings, Project Overview and Advanced right.
With the release, you can find three additional sections to add to the configuration of your project details:
- Financial Tracker
- Roles and Resources – Costs
- Cost Type Tracker
Learn more about the section in the Approved Budget and Actual Allocation Costs article.
Additionally, you can find many of the new figures in the Project List, the Project Overview, the Board view and integrated reports, and export them using the REST and the Reporting API.
Financial Events Costs
Financial Events Costs are always planned costs, not actual costs.
Compare Actuals in Integrated Reports
With this release, you can configure actuals data such as Actual Time Worked or Cost, Planned Allocations and Approved Total Effort in integrated reports. This allows you to compare planned allocations with actual time worked to analyze the data in different ways on the project, resource or portfolio level.
Broken Down Based on Zoom Level
Evaluate your projects on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis to determine those that require action due to large deviations from the plan. For example, you can create a report which displays the actual time and cost values per week or per month.
Across Projects
Analyze your actuals data per portfolio to keep track of the overall performance. For example, compare the plan vs. actuals for each project assigned to a specific OBS such as department.
Extension of the Quick Import for Actual Time Worked
The Quick Import: Actual Time Worked has been extended to allow importing more than one Actual Time Worked entry for the same project and the same resource with the same booking date.
In addition, you can now import Actual Time Worked with a different cost type and/or different cost per hour that only apply to the imported entry, for example, when using project-related cost per hour.