As organizations adopt project and portfolio management techniques to align execution with strategy, promote accountability, comply with governance and regulatory requirements, and foster overall project success, many are struggling with significant gaps created in their budgeting and financial management processes.

What cost impact do projects have on the bottom line of one or more programs or departments? How were capital budgets allocated? Where do projects fit into the overall budget? Answers to questions such as these can be elusive, even with leading project management systems in place.

With FM, organizations are able to reconcile organizational planning with project execution, providing both a top-down and bottom-up analysis capability.

Manage costs by program, project, project phase, and operation. Define forecasts by financial category and flexible time periods and maintain rolling forecasts based on varying time periods.	Click to Enlarge
Compare versions of costs and view trends. Maintain unlimited versions of costs forecasts, including standardized snapshots at regular period intervals.
Easily enter costs via a user-friendly web spreadsheet interface. Costs can be entered directly in spreadsheet cells or defined as detailed cost transactions. Add memos, notes, and any other supplementary information.

• Perform top-down budgeting
  Allocate organizational funds to programs, projects, and operations by fiscal period and category of fund. Perform what-if scenario analysis of strategic allocation of funds.
• Delegate project cost management
  Authorize project and financial managers with restricted access to their designated projects for forecasting, budget requests, and reporting.
• Monitor and report on performance
  Monitor performance of projects against budgets, forecasts and actuals. View trends and highlight problem areas.
• Consolidate forecasts and actuals from multiple sources
  Integrate with Enterprise Project Management / Project Portfolio Management and Timesheet systems to capture true bottom-up forecasts reflecting the latest project information. Also integrate with ERP and GL systems to incorporate actual expenditures.
• Perform chargebacks
  Flexibly automate 'chargebacks' of project actuals against one or more funding lines in the organization.
• Support governance and audit requirements
  Facilitate support for Sarbanes-Oxley and SOP 98-1 compliance with EcoSys FM. A full audit trail is captured for all financial changes, along with support for integrated notes, memos, and additionally required/optional information. All prior-period history data is locked-down and changes can only impact future periods, unless a formal adjustment is made.