Documentation/ Purchase orders and projects/ Spend by project
Spend by project
Once the projects are assigned, looking the figure up is a matter of filtering. There are two places to filter by project, the document lists and the dashboard, and each answers a different question.
Document lists › the Project filter · and the Dashboard
On this page
Two places, two questions
| Where | What it answers |
|---|---|
| The document list | Which particular documents belong to this project. |
| The dashboard | What this project adds up to and how it is moving. |
The list is for working, checking, correcting, sending; the dashboard is for looking. They get used at different moments.
The filter on the lists
The document lists carry a project filter alongside the rest. It is available on purchase invoices, delivery notes, sales delivery notes and transport invoices, among others.
Applied, the list shows only that project's documents, with their amounts. It combines with the other filters, date, supplier, status, and that is where its real value lies: what was spent on this job with this supplier in March.
The totals you see are those of the rows shown, so the filter is also the way to add things up.
The filter on the dashboard
The dashboard has a project selector of its own. Applied, its figures refer to that project alone: the amounts, the counts and the trend.
It is the view for the management question, how is this job going, as against the list's detailed view.
Taking it to Excel
When a project's spend has to be set against something else, a budget, a forecast, the way is to export the filtered list and do the arithmetic outside.
It is also how you split spend between several projects when a document belongs to more than one and the detail was not taken down to the lines.
When the figure is not complete
Three reasons a project's spend can come out below the real figure:
- Documents with no project assigned. This is the main cause. They appear under no project and drop out of the analysis.
- Documents split between projects whose header carries only one. The whole spend goes to that one; it is not divided.
- Documents still unprocessed or waiting to be checked, whose amounts are not yet final.
Before treating a figure as sound, check how many documents in the period have no project assigned. That is the gap the spend that will not add up escapes through.
A routine that works
- As you upload, choose the project on the upload screen whenever the batch is all one project.
- Once a week, filter the list on an empty project and assign whatever is left in bulk.
- At month end, go over the dashboard by project and set it against what you expected.
- When something does not add up, drop down to the filtered list and find the particular document.
Step two is what holds the other three up: without it, the figure is always behind reality.
What this cannot tell you
Worth knowing what it does not do:
- It does not split a document between projects from the header. For that, a project has to be assigned on each line.
- It does not compare against a budget. There is no planned amount per project to measure the variance against.
- It does not nest projects. They are a flat list: there are no projects inside projects.
For any of those three, the way is to export and work on it outside.
Things that come up
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The project's spend is lower than expected | There are documents with no project assigned. | Filter on an empty project and assign them in bulk. |
| A document shows under a project it does not belong to | It was assigned in bulk along with others. | Correct it on the document's header. |
| The project filter is not on a list | Not every document type offers it. | Use the dashboard, or export and filter in Excel. |
| The dashboard and the list give different figures | The same period or the same document type is not being applied. | Match the filters before comparing. |
| A document has to be split between two projects | The header takes only one. | Assign a project on each line, or split it outside in a spreadsheet. |