Cost and schedule
A budget item that is sixty percent invoiced tells you nothing until you know how much of the work is done. If the work is at sixty, the item is on track. If it is at thirty-five, money has left faster than the building has grown, and someone should ask why. Fidrel puts the two figures on one card by linking a budget item to the schedule activities behind it. This page shows how the link is made, what the card shows, and what the comparison cannot tell you.
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The estimate is organized by trade and cost code, the schedule by area and sequence. One budget line can span a dozen activities, and one activity can draw on three budget lines. Without a stated link, every comparison is a judgment call made in a meeting.
Percent complete is often estimated once a month for the pay period and then forgotten. Between two reports nobody sees whether a line is drifting, and the comparison is made when it is too late to act on.
Spent ahead of done can mean a problem. It can also mean a deposit on equipment or material bought early. A tool that shows only the gap invites the wrong conclusion, so the reader has to know what each figure counts.
Invoiced is the checked vendor invoices that have not been rejected, divided by the item’s current budget. Physical progress comes from the schedule: each linked activity has a progress figure that the team enters, and a group’s progress is calculated from its subactivities. Fidrel multiplies each activity’s progress by its weight and adds them up. Planned progress in the schedule assumes even progress across working days, but the figure on the cost card is the actual progress the team has entered, not the plan. Both numbers are on the same item, which is the point.
Cost tracking
Read the gap in both directions. Invoiced far ahead of progress can be a deposit, an early delivery or work billed in advance, and it can also be a line that is running over. Progress far ahead of invoiced usually means work has been done but not yet billed, which is a forecast risk too, since the invoice will arrive later and the line will move then. The alert uses the approved part of the invoices, the actual cost, rather than everything invoiced, so the card and the alert can disagree for a few days while invoices wait for approval.
Step 1
The activities must exist before they can be linked. Plan them in the project’s schedule, and let the team enter how far along each one is, by dragging the bar or by choosing a value on the progress ring.
Step 2
In the project’s cost area, open Project finances and choose the Schedule & production tab. A person with the forecast permission sees Add there, and every budget item is listed below it as a card.
Step 3
Under Add, choose the budget item, then pick a schedule activity and give its Weight %. Use Add to include more activities. For a single activity the weight starts at 100, and Fidrel refuses a save unless the weights add up to 100 percent.
Step 4
Each item shows Current budget, the Invoiced share of that budget and Physical progress. The progress figure is the weighted total of the linked activities. It shows a dash while the item has no link or a linked activity no longer exists.
Step 5
Under Financial alerts, the field Costs are ahead of production sets how far spent may run ahead of done before the line is flagged. Adjust it to the project, and open a flagged line to see its activities.
The gap that triggers the alert starts at twenty percentage points and can be set between one and one hundred by a person with the budget permission. It is a starting value, not a recommendation, and each project should set its own. The links themselves can be removed from a card at any time, and the change is recorded in the project’s history. A budget item with no link simply has no progress figure, and nothing else about it changes.
This is a plain comparison of spent and done on the same item, not earned value. Fidrel computes no schedule or cost performance index, and no earned value figure. Nothing is loaded onto the schedule from the estimate automatically: the activities, the dates and the links are entered by people. A budget item can only be linked to activities in this project, and the weights are your own estimate of each activity’s share, so the figure is only as good as that estimate.
Your trial applies to your first own project and starts when that project is created. No card required. Afterwards, choose card or invoice to continue.
The project system of the future connects people, documents and decisions. Discover the thinking behind Fidrel.
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On site, answers need to be close at hand. Fidrel displays DWG drawings in your mobile browser, within the project’s document structure.
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When everyone can see the next step, moving the project forward becomes easier. Fidrel brings activities, dates and reported progress together in a shared Gantt view.
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Anything else on your mind? We are happy to help.
Talk to usLink a budget item to its schedule activities under Schedule & production in Project finances. Each item then shows how much of its current budget is invoiced next to its physical progress.
From the schedule. The team enters how far along each activity is, a group’s progress is calculated from its subactivities, and the cost card adds the linked activities’ progress by weight.
Yes. When an item is linked to more than one activity, Fidrel refuses a save unless the weights add up to 100 percent. A single activity starts at 100.
No. It sets the invoiced share of a budget item beside its physical progress. Fidrel computes no performance indices and no earned value, and does not create activities from the estimate.
When the approved part of what has been invoiced, as a share of the current budget, runs ahead of the physical progress by more than the gap set under Financial alerts. The starting value is twenty percentage points.
