Underspending/Overspending

When evaluating the progress of a project, you can view under/overspending time and expense for the current period, then move it to the next period for reallocation.

Note: The current period is defined as the period beginning from the day of the previous estimate date until the day before the current estimate date.

Under/overspending is defined as the difference between planned hours and expenses versus actual registered work and expenses.

For example, if you planned 33 hours of work on the Strategic Work event, but the employee registered only 13 hours during the current period, there is an underspend of 20 hours.

When you run a progress evaluation, the Under/Overspend column displays under/overspending for both time and amount. This column shows the difference between the allocated hours/amounts and the actual work and expenses registered during the current period. It is available both in the main grid and the detailed grid of the Budgeting Assistant, Progress Evaluation Assistant, Resourcing workspace, and Resourcing Plans workspace.

When a project contains either time or amount lines, the summary line displays values which include any under/overspent amounts that occurred during the period. The cells in this column are also color-coded as red (if the time or amount is negative; meaning overspending) or green (if the time or amount is positive, meaning underspending). If the column displays both time and amount, the amount is displayed in square brackets.

Use the Run Under/Overspend action to calculate underspending and overspending time/amounts during the current period. Once the system has calculated this, values are displayed in the Under/Overspend column.

Note: This action is available only when:

• You are using the Progress Evaluation view in the Web Components.
• You have provided an estimate date and/or a previous estimate date. If the project does not have a previous estimate date, People Planner uses the project's start date as the previous estimate date.
• You have selected one or more events.

If you wish to restrict the use of this action to the PEA only, you can configure this when setting up web layouts.

When you use this action, a confirmation message displays to provide information regarding the changes that occur when you perform the operation. This includes the following:

• Assignments that will fail due to an error will display the reason.
• Assignments that have under/overspent hours or amounts will display the values to be distributed equally in the previous period, then carried over to the current period.

Attention: All underspending/overspending is deducted equally across all working days in the current period. These are added or subtracted on the first working day after the Estimate to Completion (ETC) date. This is done to avoid misleading capacity calculation.

For example, Employee A has nine underspent hours for the Strategic Work event in the current period. When you click the Run Under/Overspend action, Employee A’s underspent hours are deducted as nine hours booking across working days in the current period. It is then added as nine hours booking on the first day after the estimate date.

You can also choose to revert the latest allocations created from using the Run Under/Overspend action. When you use the Revert Latest Under/Overspend action, the system displays information regarding the changes that occur, such as:

• The operation fails if there are no assignments on the event.
• Assignments with no under/overspent hours or amounts will be skipped.
• Assignments that have already been reverted will be skipped.
• Assignments with under/overspent hours or amounts will display the values to be reverted and deleted within the current period and after the estimate date. If a user has manually deleted entries for either the current period or after the estimate date (or both), the system will display a message stating allocations for either period (or both) cannot be found.

Note: If you revert allocations for a previous period, the system automatically searches for the last under/overspend for each assignment, even if it is not within the current period. For example, if you choose to revert allocations in August, and the latest allocations were in June, the system will delete the June allocations.