Use the Tolerances settings to specify the actual-to-budget variance percentages that trigger alerts in the following analytics:
Revenue
Profit
Backlog
The alerts appear in the Variance Analysis tables on the project analytics tabs in Costpoint Analytics – Project. When an alert is triggered, the table cell that displays the variance percentage has either a yellow or red background, depending on the type of alert.
These tolerances also control alerts for the Revenue, Profit, and Backlog summary analytics in Costpoint Analytics – Summary. The alerts appear as background color in the bullet graphs and as colored borders around variance amounts in the tables.
The same tolerance settings apply to all of your companies and organizations. For example, you cannot specify one pair of revenue tolerances for one of your companies and a different pair of revenue tolerances for another company.
For each of the analytics, set up the following alerts:
Cautionary alert — Enter the variance percentage that marks the threshold between acceptable and cautionary status. Variances with the cautionary status display with a yellow background.
Urgent alert — Enter the variance percentage that marks the threshold between cautionary and urgent status. Variances with the urgent status display with a red background.
You enter 2.00 in Cautionary Alert When Below and 4.00 in Urgent Alert When Below under Revenue Tolerances. With these settings and a revenue budget of $10,000, the following would occur:
If actual revenue is $9,900, the variance is 1 percent, an acceptable variance based on the tolerances. A 2% variance, exactly matching the cautionary alert threshold, is also acceptable.
If the actual revenue is $9,790, a 2.1% variance, the Revenue Variance Analysis table on the Revenue Analytics tab displays that variance with a yellow background to indicate a cautionary status.
If the actual revenue is $9,590, a 4.1% variance, the variance background is red to alert you to an urgent status.
As part of Costpoint Analytics implementation, determine the cautionary and urgent tolerances for revenue, profit, and backlog, and enter those percentages under Revenue Tolerances, Profit Tolerances, and Backlog Tolerances.
Normally, you do not change this setting after the initial configuration. However, you can change the tolerance settings at any time if you determine that the current settings are not what you want.