Billable Forecast Reports calculate billable hours and revenue for future months. The reports use the User Bill Rate custom field and future assignment schedules to determine approximate expected monthly billings in the future. The calculations work for both Time and Materials (T&M) and Fixed Price (FP) projects.


Billable Forecast Report options

 Figure 28.20. Billable Forecast Report options


Billable Forecast Reports have some prerequisites for displaying accurate data. The prerequisites are as follows:



  1. There must be a project custom field named �Project Type�. The field must be a text selection list with two values (if you want to use both billing calculation methods): �Time & Material� and �Fixed Price�. You can also add a third selection, such as �Not Applicable�, for projects that should not be displayed in Billable Forecast Reports. The Project Type selected for the top level project will automatically apply to all of the project�s tasks.             
  2. Users included in reports for Time and Materials-based projects must have values in the User Bill Rate fields and the User Bill Rate Type must be Hourly.                  
  3. The system setting under Configuration-->System Settings-->Project Settings for �Default number of hours worked each week� must contain a value and/or the �User Work             Hours Per Week� must be set for each user.                  
  4. Fixed Price projects must include a contract value for leveling across the period of the project. There must be a project custom field named �Services Contract Value� with the             dollar amount of the return expected for the project. The data type for the field must be set to number. The value for the top level project automatically applies to all tasks             underneath the project.                  
  5. All billable time to be forecasted must be covered by an explicit user assignment to a project task. 


The date range options for Billable Forecast Reports are the same as those offered in other report types. However, the way they are used to filter data is somewhat different. In most         report types, the dates determine what actual hours or expenses are shown in the report. For Billable Forecast Reports, the dates are used to filter on active scheduled projects for the         date range. In other words, all scheduled projects with scheduled start or end dates that fall within the report date range are shown in the report, regardless of whether or not actuals         were entered during the period. Setting Billable Forecast Reports to ask for the date at run time generally makes the most sense because these reports will be run for a future period most of the time.


Show detailed information by user
This option breaks down each task and project into the Monthly Billable Hours and Amounts per user. The user details are listed under each task and/or project.

      

Fields to Display in Report
This option allows you to specify which of the Billable Forecast Report fields should be displayed in the current report. The fields specific to the Billable Forecast Report are:


Billable Hours
This field shows the total remaining scheduled hours forecasted for billable projects based on the date range selected and broken out by month. Since this is a future/forecast report, there should be no actual hours to consider, but they will be ignored if entered. The scheduled hours are calculated based on the task assignments for a project.

          

Billable Amount
There are two separate calculations that are performed to establish the total estimated billing for any month, one for Time & Material project and one for Fixed Price projects. The Fixed Price calculation determines Earned Services Revenue (ESR), which is defined as (services % complete * services contract value). The Time & Material calculation determines Billed Services Revenue (BSR), which is defined as (projected user hours * user bill rate). For this report, both types of projects are shown on a monthly basis for all users and then aggregated to give the monthly total.

          

Unassigned Hours
This field shows the number of task scheduled hours that are still unassigned broken out by month. These scheduled hours are not included in the Billable Amounts because there are no users assigned to work these hours.