Exco level monetary benefits tracking - how?

[N1COLA]

Across multiple projects I have to be able to track financial savings,  I then need to be able to report upwards to our exco as to what month on month financial savings have been made.

I think we use the Monetary Benefits tab, but how has anyone use it to make sure the benefit is being realised and then dashboard / exported out to our finance team to prove the savings?  

[Mark Manders]

Well, you need the data. If you say 'this project is going to save us 1M a year' and it gets approved, you need to track the actual savings. That's not done on the project. The project is to ensure the work is done that is needed for that saving. That result isn't registered on the project. Do you have that data available in ServiceNow? Do you register current money spend on the ServiceDesk, so you can check at the end of the year if the project that would save money on the SD indeed delivered that gain?

What you can do on projects is check actual PROJECT cost against the budget and see what you saved on a project. And you can track what is stated to be a financial saving. But that has to be compared with the actual savings and that simply isn't in a project. If you have it in ServiceNow, you can report on it, but often that's not something tracked on the platform. 

[N1COLA]

Thanks - indeed its on the benefits plan - cash savings option. Its more how to aggregate it up across multiple projects and programmes that I am trying to work out.  As its not a costs vs actuals type challenge. 

[alexankaras]

When you create a benefit plan, it creates "breakdown" records (see at the bottom):



On each breakdown, there is the Entered Benefit (planned) and the Actual benefit (actual). If you use the financials page from inside the workspace, these breakdowns are what you see and update on the grid view:

 
Knowing how that's stored, you can easily create reports on portfolio/program level. The neat thing is that these breakdown records have a portfolio and a program field inherited from the project, so you don't even need to dot-walk for that!

Here's an example bar chart in platform analytics with all the aggregated planned and actual benefits per fiscal period on a specific portfolio:

 
Of course, if you realize this data model, visualizations and aggregations is the easy part :).

[N1COLA]

Thanks this is very helpful to see,  when you created a portfolio IT Transformation, I will have projects across multiple portfolios all with Cash Savings benefits plans that I will need to bring together to show. 

I can see in the workspace you have record type benefits, so I guess that is the monetary benefit plan that the individual will be responsible for updating?  It wont be via actuals as this wont be in our Oracle system I dont think as a saving.