Project budget management and time-phased forecasting

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Project Operations updates. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Aug 31, 2023 To be announced

Business value

This feature provides better control over the status of spend and work progress and helps project managers forecast trends for the future duration of the project.

Feature details

A project budget is a versioned snapshot of the financial estimation of time, expenses, and materials required on the project. Project managers can create these snapshots at different periods during the project lifecycle based on revisions and re-estimations of project scope and work.

The latest snapshot represents the best-known scope of the project at any given time. All monitoring of spend and consumption will be tracked against the latest snapshot. Project Operations adds this key capability to help the project manager get a clear view of how they are tracking to their spending and progress targets. This provides the ability to add forecasts based on current spending trends and follows these within a desired granularity of periods configured using project calendars and working days. Comparison of actual spending to budgeted and forecasted spending will help project managers come up with earned value analysis for their project to understand the schedule and financial progress. Project managers can also revise the project budget based on the new scope or changed reality and track the actuals against the revised budget going forward.

With this release, time-phased forecasting would be added to Project Operations Lite deployment and the whole feature would be enabled for Project Operations for resource/nonstocked deployment.

Out-of-the-box reports to track the actual cost versus budgeted costs of time, materials, expense.

Screenshot of budget tracking showing the actual versus budget cost variance.

Screenshot of budgeted cost distributed across time.

See also

Use time-phased project cost budget lines (docs)