Cobra 8.3 Help System

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Calendars

Spreading budgets, summarizing costs, and reporting depend on calendars to determine the dates and time spans of the summarized costs.

When you define a calendar, Cobra allows you to select common fiscal calendars such as end of the month or 4w, 4w, 5w calendars. You can also manually add any calendar date you want to a calendar. When you spread budget over several fiscal periods, you have options on how the budget is spread. You can select to spread data equally over all of the periods, using working (productive) hours, or using both working days and holidays. The fiscal calendar allows you to define the cutoff days, the working hours, and the holidays for the reporting calendar of the company.

When you load data, such as a budget, into a project, the data is stored in the time period buckets defined by the calendar. You should take the time in the beginning of the project to ensure the calendar is correct. Respread is a process to help you change the time-phased data to match your calendar periods. However, this procedure changes the budget spread.

While Cobra can facilitate earned value management on a weekly basis for the entire project, the data generated in long projects would be overwhelming. The rolling wave process gives you a means to analyze earned value data in weekly periods for a defined window of time while retaining the rest of the data in monthly periods. This reduces the amount of data with which you have to deal.

In addition to defining the periods for storing time-phased data, calendars are used to define and store calendar sets. Cobra uses calendar sets for the following:

  • Spreading budget: If you want to enter budget for planning packages by fiscal period, you can designate the calendar set on the cost class. If you have planning packages that last several years, you could reduce the size of your data substantially by not saving monthly data.
  • Rolling wave: Set 01 is used to match the monthly calendar to the weekly calendar.
  • Current period reporting: The status date and the previous period are stored in set 18 for IPMR reporting.
  • IPMR Formats 3 and 4 reporting: Defining the specified periods in these standard reports.
    Attention: For more information, see the Configure Calendar Set 19 for IPMR Reports, wInsight Integration, and Cost Data Export/DCDE Format help topic.
  • Time-phased reports: Each calendar set allows for specification of the label (column heading in a report or the Time-phase dialog box for each period reported, and to flag the periods to be reported on, such as monthly, quarterly, or yearly).