question Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card in SPM forum

Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:58:14 GMT

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the relation between the Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan and Time card.

I could see that when I create a project/demand and associate a resource plan, cost plan got auto created with cost breakdowns. Once the resource plan is approved, I could see the expense line created and when the expense line is processed, actual cost on project/demand got populated based on the expense line.

Wanted to know the relation between the above mentioned entities with a project/demand/resource.

Thanks

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

mike_bush — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 07:52:46 GMT

Cost Management, Resource Management and their interaction with Project Management are huge areas with much complexity.

The WIKI (DOC) does a good job of explaining individual bits but seeing the complete picture is never easy.

I have done some learning in the past by getting into the SCHEMA MAP and "stepping" from one entity to another doodling my own, partial schema as I went.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 08:12:05 GMT

Hi,

I have gone through the individual applications but my concern is about the correlation of these applications and their inter dependencies. Some fields related to cost are dependent directly or indirectly with other applications where i need some help in understanding.

Thanks

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

arun_vydianatha — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 13:30:04 GMT

Cost plans are the basic units under Project/Demand to do financial planning. Through cost plan you can enter the financial requirements for the project like software costs/hardware or training or labor or travel requirements

In the ITFM application you should have defined the fiscal calendar required as per your organization.

The costs entered in cost plan are for a specific period (say FY17: Jan to FY17: Dec), once the costs are entered the cost is broken down per period and stored into the Cost break down table. At what level it is broken down is dependent on the Fiscal calendar setup in your instance. It can be quarter or month or week.

So in the above case you will get 12 records in the Cost Plan break down table for each of the months from Jan to Dec.

The Cost plan breakdown has a column called "Breakdown Type". It takes values like "Requirement", "Task", "Portfolio" or "Program". For the above 12 records created above the breakdown type would be "Requirement".

A project can have multiple cost plans and each cost plan will have many cost break down records.

Now we do a rollup at Cost Plan Breakdown level (of all the records belonging to a project) and store the aggregate value of all costs per period in Cost Plan breakdown table with Breakdown type as "Task". This is the overall cost of project distributed across the fiscal periods. A portfolio/program can have n number of projects and all the Cost Plan Breakdowns for the projects belonging to the portfolio/program are rolled up and again stored in Cost breakdown table with Breakdown type as "Portfolio"

If you see above diagram you will get the picture. Portfolio has 3 projects.

For each project by quarter I know the cost and they are rolled up into Portfolio.

The Cost breakdown record for a Project are in turn rolled up from the Cost requirements entered for the project.

So to recap the data model is something like this

Resource Plans

Resource plans also have cost associated with them. But you don't have to explicitly create a Cost plan record for a resource plan. When resource plans are created we know which resources/groups are going to work on and we know the labor rate for those resources, we know the time period in which they are going to work. So we auto-create cost plans for you from the resource plans.

It would be something like this

Time Cards

Time cards capture the actual time worked and the actual cost incurred for the work. The actuals incurred are brought back to the Cost plan breakdown records at Task level and stored there and also further rolled up to Portfolio/Program

Not only time cards any expense line you create (in fm_expense_line table) you can map the expense to a Project and also a specific Cost Plan in the project. Once the expense line is processed the actual cost is brought back to Cost Plan breakdown record (against that requirement) and stored there and also rolled up to Project and Portfolio level.

As you can see below in expense line you have cost plan field

And once expense line is processed the actuals are stored against the same Cost plan (see the Actual in related list)

And also rolled up to Project level (See actual column in related list)

Hope this clears some of your confusion. Ping back if you have further questions.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:26:17 GMT

Thanks Arun for the detailed explanation. I still am confused a bit regarding the cost plan breakdown and cost calculation in project/demand.

Is Cost plan breakdown the basic entity to start the cost roll up??

Even after time card approval, and after an expense line is processed, does cost gets updated in cost plan breakdown and then to project??

Also we have some confusion regarding the budget cost and cost allocations in cost plan and cost plan breakdown

Can you please share any document or link that explains these calculations and dependencies a bit further.

Thanks

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

kellykaufmann — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 03:36:16 GMT

Hi sreedharkalisetty

For the demand/project manager role in Helsinki…

On the demand/project form, create cost plans specifying my demand/project's
- Software, hardware, labor, travel, training and other requirements
- When I would need these resources ( start fiscal period and end period year)
- Classify expense type of my requirement as capital expense (Capex) or operational expense (Opex)
On demand/project form, you view:
- rolled-up cost for each fiscal period. For example, my project needs $30K in Feb 2015 for operational expenses.
- budget allocated to my project/demand for each fiscal period
- actual amount spent on my project in each fiscal period (Project form only).

'Cost Plans' has been added as a related list in demand and project form to capture project cost. Another related list 'Cost Breakdown' has been added to view breakdown of Estimated Cost, Budget ( allocated budget) and Actual Cost for each 'Expense Type'.

For your budget questions, I suggest starting by reading up on Portfolio Workbench functionality https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-it-business-management/page/product/project-management/task/t_CreateABudgetPlanFromPortfolio.html.

Does this help?

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 13:47:58 GMT

Can you please tell me how the fields on financials tab project form get auto populated, if they are rolled up, can you please tell me from where they are getting rolled up and the calculation part at the base entity where roll up starts. Please let me know all the mentioned details for the fields Estimated cost, actual cost and Budget cost

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 05:00:23 GMT

PFB link

Actual project costs

The link explains that actual cost get rolled up based on the expense lines and these expense lines can be created in two ways

Auto created when time cards are processed
Manual creation for the cost plans.

Actual cost get populated only when the expense lines are processed.

Can you please let me know the significance of the cost plan breakdown and its role in cost calculation and roll up.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

kellykaufmann — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 06:05:18 GMT

Glad you found the documentation, Sreedhar. Can you please be more specific in your question?

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

Balaji39 — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 06:42:51 GMT

Hi Sreedhar, The actual cost is captured in the cost breakdown for the respective fiscal period when an expense line is processed. The expense line submitted date will be used to pick which fiscal period will this actual cost go to. This will help us report the actual vs allocated for each month.

To your other question on where does the cost come from in the project financial tab, Both the estimated and actual cost are rolled up from the cost breakdown of type task.

Hope this helps

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 04:25:34 GMT

Thanks for your replies.

The budgeted cost field available on project form will be auto populated based on the budget allocations of the portfolio to which this project is associated with.

Can you please explain me how a budget plan created will be approved and how the allocations done roll down to project.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

arun_vydianatha — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 05:59:12 GMT

You can read more about budget plans here Budget plans

It is part of the IT Financial Management product (not part of PPS)

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 06:28:03 GMT

Hi Arun,

I have gone through the link but i could not understand how a budget plan is approved and allocations are done. Please explain the same

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 06:10:38 GMT

Hi,

Please help me on understanding this as we have to update our customer

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

kellykaufmann — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 20:58:38 GMT

Hi sreedharkalisetty

Technical-wise, there isn't anything like an approval button for budgets. It is a matter of roles. Budget plans . Once a budget is agreed upon, you promote budgets to forecasts Budget forecasts Promote a budget plan to a forecast .

Process-wise, approval would depend on the organization. Here is a sample of roles in budgeting:

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

kellykaufmann — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 21:00:23 GMT

anna.scheib is this content covered in the PPM training offered by ServiceNow?

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 05:08:04 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for your detailed reply.

According to the below screenshot, it says budget plan has to be approved so that it can be selected for allocations. Please let me where and how a budget plan can be approved.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

arun_vydianatha — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 05:25:51 GMT

There is no approval per se for budget plan

Approval means you have to promote the budget plan.

After promotion you can select the budget plan in Allocate budget page shown above.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

sreedharkaliset — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 05:40:36 GMT

Thank you Arun. This helped a lot.

Re: Cost plan, Cost breakdown, Expense line, Resource plan, Time card

ITSMgal — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 23:07:14 GMT

The one slide you might be missing in the explanation shows how cost plan breakdown fields are differentiated. There are many rows in the table with different functions. @

Look at the Breakdown Type in your screen shot above: It says "requirement"

If you want individual demand and project costs, only look at records for the breakdown type of "requirement".

If you want aggregated records, you look at the program or portfolio.

Maybe Arun can clarify what a breakdown type of "requirement" means more specificallly.

arun.vydianathan