19 Nov OnePlan Supports Your Financial Management Process
One of the critical factors which determine success when implementing a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system for your organization is supporting your overall organization’s financial management structure and processes. This is an area where many PPM systems either fail to address or do so without the flexibility required for each customer organization.
OnePlan’s Financial Planner (FP) module was designed to meet this challenge.
OnePlan FP handles the complete cost management process used by the customer organization, beginning with the annual budgeting cycle and preliminary budgets for each known project and support/operational activities. A typical Preliminary Budget for a project is shown in the screen above. As projects get closer to the detailed planning as required by the IT Governance process, the FP module can initiate and enforce the requirement for a more detailed Approved Budget as shown below, where Labor, Hardware, and Software is broken down further.
The system provides a comprehensive administration function which permits the organization to configure multiple types of costs (like the Preliminary Budget and Approved Budget in the above example), and Forecasts Costs and Actual Costs. The overall cost structure (your Code of Accounts) is also easily configured.
Financial management flexibility and configurability is one of the most critical functionalities required in PPM. Cost management affects not just significant projects but also the support and operational efforts which consume the majority of an IT budget for many organizations. In many cases, some form of budgeting is required long before a project starts execution, sometimes before the responsible project manager is assigned. The latter is one reason why many PPM tools cannot handle cost management properly; project costs are not tied to detail project scheduling tasks.
OnePlan FP was designed to meet the situations identified here. And have the capability to integrate with other corporate financial systems such as accounting. And of course, OnePlan FP provides comprehensive reporting and analysis functionality.
OnePlan Financial Planner Overview