Roll up expenses and resources in an engagement
Summarize
Summary of Roll up expenses and resources in an engagement
In audit projects, managing and consolidating costs, budgets, and resources is essential for effective oversight. The Zurich release introduces theAdvanced Auditplugin within the Audit Management application, which, when combined with the Project Portfolio Management application, enables automatic creation of engagement projects and comprehensive rollup of expenses and resources. This functionality allows audit managers to view consolidated costs and resources across all engagements and their parent plans, enhancing visibility and control over audit project finances and resource allocation.
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Key Features
- Advanced Audit Plugin Activation: Enables rollup of expenses and resource costs from all engagements into a consolidated view.
- Project Budget Rollup: Users with the
itportfoliomanagerrole can create project budgets that synchronize budget costs with the engagement’s budgeted expenses, ensuring consistency. Budget values from project budgets overwrite engagement budget expenses if updated. - Actual Expenses and Resources Rollup: Actual effort and cost updates on engagement projects automatically reflect as actual resources and actual expenses on the engagement record.
- Resource Plan Rollup: Resource plans added via Project Portfolio Management, once allocated, automatically sum confirmed and allocated hours into planned resources on the engagement project. Manual entry in planned resources is disabled when resource plans exist, maintaining data integrity.
- Cost Plan Rollup: Independent cost plans (not derived from resource plans) restrict manual entry into planned expenses on the engagement form but allow editing of planned resources.
Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers
Activating the Advanced Audit plugin and integrating Project Portfolio Management streamlines financial and resource tracking across audit engagements. Audit managers gain a consolidated, accurate view of budgets, actuals, and resource plans, facilitating better decision-making and audit project oversight. Role-based budget creation ensures controlled budget management, while automatic rollups reduce manual data entry and errors. Understanding the constraints on manual edits in planned resources and expenses fields helps maintain consistency and prevents data conflicts.
Any audit project has associated costs, budgets, and resources. Roll ups of these costs, budgets, and resources enable the audit manager to view the entire costs and resources in a consolidated manner.
Starting with the new release, a new plugin called Advanced Audit has been introduced in the Audit Management application. When you activate the Advanced Audit plugin and install the Project Portfolio Management application, you can utilize the project management capabilities to automatically create engagement projects.
When an audit plan is created, the audit manager must be able to view the complete expenses and the resources involved in the engagement. Activating the Advanced Audit plugin enables the rollup of the expenses and resources cost of all engagements for a consolidated view. You can also use the advanced planning capabilities to automatically roll up the expenses and resources of each individual engagement to the parent plan of the engagements.
Project budget rollup
After an engagement project is automatically created, if the user has the it_portfolio_manager role, the user can create a project budget. When a budget is created, the budget cost gets copied over to the Budgeted expenses field of the engagement from the engagement project. When you use the advanced planning capabilities to automatically create a plan, the values in the expenses and the resources field are rolled up from the associated engagements and the engagement projects. To allocate a project budget, see Allocate budget to a project. If you allocate a project budget, then the data from the budget cost field gets copied over to the engagement. For example, if you have an engagement where the budget expense is $100. Then, if you create a project budget for the engagement project of this engagement, and enter the budget cost as $200, then the budget expense of $100 in the engagement is overwritten and replaced by $200.
Actual expenses and resources rollup
If actual effort is updated on an engagement project, then that value gets copied over to actual resources on the engagement. The Actual resources and Actual expenses both are copied over from the Actual effortand Actual cost fields.
Resource plan rollup
With Project Portfolio Management, you can add resource plans and cost plans to an engagement. To learn how to create an engagement with advanced planning, see Create an engagement with advanced planning
After you create a resource plan and it is in the Allocated state, all the confirmed and allocated hours from the resource plan are summed up in the planned resources on the engagement project. When a resource plan is created, you cannot manually enter the hours in the Planned resources field on the engagement form as the values get automatically rolled up. To manually enter hours in the Planned resources field, you must delete the resource plan that you have created.
Cost plan rollup
If you create an independent cost plan that is not created as a result of a resource plan, then you cannot manually enter values in the Planned expenses field on the engagement form. You can still edit the Planned resources field.