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How to Copy Financial Plans from Project Templates

When you populate projects using data from a project template that contains cost plans and benefit plans, these plans and their association are copied over from the template to the new project. The dates on these plans shift according to the project's start date. While copying over, you can scale the costs of the plans in the template by a defined percentage.

Note: See the Financial Management User Guide for more information.

Before copying financial plans from a project template, you must make sure that fiscal time periods exist that include the start dates of the template project and the new project.

Note: See the Administration Guide for more information.

You can copy financial plans from a template in the following ways:

• Create a project using a template.
• Manually copy from a template into an existing project.
• Run a process that copies from a template into an existing project.

  Note: See the Administration Guide for more information.

Irrespective of the method you use for copying financial plans from project templates where there are existing cost plans and benefit plans in place, the copy behavior is as follows:

• If you choose to copy from a template associated to an entity that is not the entity to which your target project is associated, all data including the simple budget is copied from the template to the new project template's, except for the financial plans.
• A financial plan's ID is unique within each individual project. If the template's financial plan ID is the same as that of the target project's ID, the financial plan from the template is copied and its ID is modified so that it is unique within the specific project. If there is already a Plan Of Record (POR) in the destination project, the POR from the template loses its POR flag.
• The time lapse between the financial plans and the start date of the project in the template is measured. This same time lapse is carried forward when setting the new start dates of the financial plans based on the target project's start date.

  Note: This behavior applies to tasks and staffing data. However, if a project template does not include tasks and only has staffing requirements, you can expand or collapse the time duration of the target project.

• You have the option to scale the project template's budget with a percentage factor (positive or negative) to define the budget of the target project.
• If only the project template's budget properties are defined, the budget properties' Planned Cost and Planned Benefit dollar values are copied to the target project with the scaling factor applied.
• If the project template's detail cost plan is defined, the budget properties' Planned Cost and Planned Benefit dollar values reflect the dollar amount in the POR and the dollar amount in the benefit plan associated to the POR with the scaling factor applied. Regardless of whether you selected to set the planned cost dates, the dates in the budget properties reflect the dates in the POR and its associated benefit plan.
• All budgets with various statuses (Submitted, Approved, Rejected) are not copied from the project template to the target project.

Forecast costs are not copied when copying the project from a template, creating a new project from a template.

Fields Used for Copying Financial Plans

When you copy financial plans, some of the fields defined when you first created the project are used. The following fields on the Create Projects page affect how the financial plans are copied over:

Start Date

Defines the new project's start date that you specified. The dates on the financial plans that are copied over from the template, shift in the new project according to this start date. The End Date field in the template is ignored during the financial plan copy process. The new end date is automatically calculated for each cost plan and benefit plan based on their original plan durations in the template and their new start dates.

Example: Consider that a project template includes the following financial plans and the project start date is December 2008.

• Cost Plan A is POR and spans two years from Jan 2009-Dec 2010.
• Cost Plan B spans two years from June 2009-June 2011.
• Benefit plan C (associated with Cost Plan A) spans three years from Jan 2011 – Dec 2014.
• Benefit plan D (associated with Cost Plan B) spans four years from July 2011 – July 2015.
• Benefit plan E (unassociated) spans four years from June 2011 – June 2015.

When you copy the project template data to the new project with a start date of December 2011, the financial plans shift as per this new start date but maintain the same time lapse (between their start and end dates) as was originally in the template. Accordingly, they have the following new start and end dates:

• Cost plan A is POR and still spans two years from Jan 2012 – Dec 2013 (maintains the one month lapse with the project start date as before).
• Cost plan B still spans two years from June 2012 – June 2014 (maintains the six months lapse with the project start date as before).
• Benefit plan C still spans three years from Jan 2014 – Dec 2017 (maintains the two years and one month lapse with the project start date as before).
• Benefit plan D still spans four years from July 2014 – July 2018 (maintains the two years and seven months lapse with the project start date as before).
• Benefit plan E still spans four years from June 2014 – June 2018 (maintains the two years and six months lapse with the project start date as before).

Set Planned Cost Dates (Keep Planned Cost Dates in Sync with Investment Dates)

This field is only taken into consideration when there are no detail budgets available in the project template. This is ignored when there are detail budgets in the project template. If this option is checked, the dates for Planned Cost and Planned Benefit are kept the same as the project start and end dates. If the option is not checked, the dates for Planned Cost and Planned Benefit are shifted based on the difference between the template project start date and the destination project start date.

Department

This field allows you to select a different entity and department OBS for the new project. If the template project has Department defined, this field is automatically populated from the template as a default. If you select the same department or a different department that belongs to the same entity as the template, the financial plans are copied to the new project. If you select a different department that belongs to a different entity than the template, the financial plans are not copied to the new project. However, simple budget is copied from the template to the new project.

Scale Budget By

This field allows you to enter a percentage (positive or negative) as the scaling factor for the dollar amounts defined in project template's cost plans and benefit plans.

Example: Consider that a template project starts from 1/1/2009 to 12/31/2009 and allocates $10,000 for Planned Cost and $20,000 for Planned Benefit with a duration of 2/1/2009 to 12/31/2009. In the new project, the plans copy over as follows (assuming a Scale Budget By value of 20%): the new project dates are from 1/1/2009 to 12/31/2009. The simple budget under project property shows the budget duration as 2/1/2009 to 12/31/2009. The Planned Cost shows $12000 and the Planned Benefit shows $24,000 (both scaled up by an additional 20% of the original values).

More information:

Create Projects from Project Templates

Copy Project Template Data into Projects

Collaboration Tools

Financial Processing (Project)