Snapshotting Financial Forecasting in Next Experience

[meta1203]

Hi all,

I've been working on getting a client ported over to the Next Experience, specifically project-based financial management. Everything seems to be fairly straightforward, save for trying to nail down how financial forecasting snapshots are supposed to work. Historically, we would use the Portfolio Workbench to select and promote budgets and forecasts, which would generate itfm_plan_versions records.

sn_invst_pln_invst_budget_list appears to be the new home for budget data, but we're at a loss for where the new forecast data is supposed to live. It looks like the baseline functionality would work for what we need it to do, as baselines capture both cost_plan_breakdown.budget and cost_plan_breakdown.cost_default_currency, which could be used for snapshots of both budget and "forecast" data respectively. However, I'm a little hesitant to move everything over to this as my understanding of baselines is that they're "more formal" than forecasting, and encapsulate more information than just the finances. None of the documentation seems to mention forecasting any more in-depth than in passing, or other than specifically with regards to resource management. I don't want to try and use a system that wasn't intended for use in this way, especially if actual "forecasting" is on its way.

Does anybody have more information regarding how to do financial forecasting within the Next Experience than what appears to be in the docs?

[Vinay3 · Accepted solution]

Hi @meta1203 , the financial baselines are the right way to capture the snapshots of the budget and forecast data. In Servicenow SPM 'budget' fields are supposed to be used for 'formal' approved amounts and 'baselines' can be used to capture the snapshots of financials forecasts (Actuals for past fiscal periods + planned for current and future fiscal period) at a given point in time.

The financial baselines can be created manually or automatically through a scheduled job.

A new Portfolio financials screen is currently in development which gives users ability to track budget vs latest forecast, actuals etc in SPW/PPW for portfolio users. Ability to capture financial baselines and compare the data between multiple baselines of multiple projects under the portfolio plan could be added as a future enhancement in this screen over the long term.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

[meta1203]

Awesome, thanks for the clarification! I think my confusion stemmed from my understanding of baselines as they apply to project management, so the fact that they're much less formal (for lack of a better word) in ServiceNow makes this quite the slick solution.