Say Hello to Forecast’s Massive Financial Report

Financial reporting is an important part of project management and it goes well beyond simply planning and managing costs on individual projects. Costs associated with the project investment, the expected profit, and overall company financials should be part of the snapshot you show when having a monthly meeting with management.

Forecast's Budget feature, ensures project managers and CFOs benefit from a holistic view of individual project’s financials. But wouldn’t you benefit even more from having an overview of the entire project portfolio financials? Forecast is proud to introduce you to the ultimate Project Portfolio Report, as part of its premium plan, which enables every number-driven project manager and CFO to measure profitability across multiple projects and responsible departments.

The importance of financial reporting

The weight of financial reports can’t be overemphasized as they are made to illustrate a company’s financial conditions. The primary objective of financial reporting is to provide top management, investors, and creditors with financial information about how the projects are progressing. Financial reporting meetings are held to build transparency, understanding, and awareness around where the organization’s investments and finances are heading. In fact, a powerful financial report is needed to help with strategic decision making.

Anyone doing financial analysis, be it a lead project manager, a financial analyst or CFO, should be ready to answer the question if projects are earning or burning money and have data at hand to prove it. Financial reporting tools could thus serve to provide you with a more informed financial summary on what’s happening and where you stand against your initial baseline.

What is financial reporting like in Forecast?

The Project Portfolio Report in Forecast offers premium users a robust real-time view of the entire project portfolio’s finances. All the numbers you might need to share are consolidated in one rich digital dashboard that can be grouped, stacked, and exported based on what you prefer to present today. 

Depending on who you’ll report to, there are generally two different types of reporting – financial reporting for stakeholders and management reporting to discuss internal management of a company. Therefore, financial reports should be customizable enough to show relevant info to each party. Made with this point in mind, Forecast has many filters to adjust the view.

How does it work? The platform connects every part of the project’s financial and scheduling data to generate a report that lets you drill down to the revenue, cost, and profit of multiple projects at once. Each task, milestone, project, and any billable or non-billable element of work that was planned on the project will affect the numbers. 

Forecast starts calculating project budgets when the team begins to make time entries and it is instantly reflected in the report. Thus, it generates a report where you can access every number including fixed-price, planned, actual, and remaining cost, revenue, and profit. For each, you can choose a set period of time (Period Totals in the system), that will appear in the highlighted column next to the Project Totals. You can also see the financial picture of your projects that are still at the planning stage.

What’s included in Forecast’s Project Portfolio Report?

CFOs and lead project managers might also benefit from the overview of Company Financials and Margin. The project’s progress, ID, status, dates, stage, project contact, and more sections can be added to the report for your convenience. To avoid confusion, you’re presented with insights about how each column is calculated by the system.

Lead project managers can also benefit from project breakdown in real time to unmount and see how different roles, milestones, or expenses affect the whole financial picture of a specific project. The robuste financial reporting in Forecast makes sure that you have all the necessary details at your fingertips. 

Overall, by using Forecast’s advanced financial reporting, you can: 

• Quickly respond to changes and gain more in-depth insights by easily sharing financial insights across your business. 
• View consolidated results at any given period or in the totals of the company. 
• See everything from a holistic view and analyze activity across projects by drilling down.
• Tailor the view and get the numbers you need at this point.
• Make decisions with real-time project accounting on a company/portfolio level or by analyzing how actual costs you spend are different, compared to what was planned. 
• Support and ensure ownership across project managers by enabling them to work with their project budget in one view. 
• Create a natural communication flow and dialogue between different departments. Report, measure, and facilitate collaboration across departments. Now all of you can work on making the projects profitable.
• Control the billability and profitability by connecting Forecast with your favorite accounting system. 

All Forecast’s features dedicated to finance management, tracking, and reporting, provide managers with a perspective on projects from two angles. First, thanks to the Project Portfolio Report, you understand where you make money. Second, the Budget page allows you to follow the evolution of each project with insights into every detail. Both guarantee better communication in financial reporting.

Remember that Forecast integrates seamlessly with accounting systems, so you can connect your entire ecosystem and have one view of it all.

Sign up below to easily see finance automation in action and how it connects with projects and provides visibility into the financial data of each department.