Planning: What's new in 2024

Planning now integrates with Frontdoor’s User Locale settings, automatically adjusting date and number formats to match each user’s configured locale. This enhancement allows users to customize how dates and numbers are displayed, creating a more personalized experience. Each country or region follows distinct standards and conventions for representing numbers. Variations may include the symbols used for decimal separation, grouping formats, currency display, and the order of year, month, and day in dates.

• Starting with Release 3.81, Planning will display dates and number formats based on the User Locale settings configured in Frontdoor, rather than the browser’s locale settings.
• The default locale in Frontdoor is en_US, so if users have not set a preferred locale, dates and numbers will appear in en_US format.
• This change applies only to viewing and entering dates and numbers within the application. For import/export files, Frontdoor locale settings are not applied; users should specify date and number formats in the formatting options of the import/export dialog.

  

  For more information, see Configure Date and Number Format.

• The Comparison Plan dropdown in the Add Comparison or Compare Shortcut dialog now displays plan names in alphabetical order, making it quicker and easier to locate the desired plan for comparison.
• Fixed an issue where import and export functionality did not work for custom lists containing the '/' character in the name.
• Fixed an issue with sorting in the "User Name" column in the Configuration > Cost Object Permissions table.
• Fixed an issue where the project export template provided incorrect headers for import into project reference data.
• Fixed an issue in PFP environments that prevented reference data updates due to incomplete cleanup of custom dimensions in the Allocation and Demand tables.

This release contains system maintenance updates and bug fixes.

• Resolved an issue where the Contracts tab failed to load when accessed in the New View.
• Resolved an issue where sorting a column in the Cost Object Permissions table caused the page to display blank.

Apptio Planning is now integrated with the Fiscal Calendar Service (FCS), a centralized platform service within Apptio. FCS is designed to manage fiscal calendars across all Apptio products, allowing customers to define their fiscal calendar once and apply it across all subscribed products. This integration simplifies fiscal calendar management with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to view, edit, and update calendar configurations.

Please note: If you're using a 445 Variant or 13 Period calendar, you will manage your calendar definitions through the Fiscal Calendar Service. Calendar types can only be set during the initial configuration.

FCS is accessible to users with Admin role. FCS is available as a new application in your Frontdoor environment.

For more information, see Fiscal Calendar Services.

• You can now create layouts for sub-tabs within the Expenses tab, such as Existing or Planning Labor, in the New View.
• Resolved an issue with exporting Plan data to Apptio Costing (Cost Transparency) when using the "Publish Months for all Fiscal Years as columns in a single row" format. The Plan data export now correctly adheres to the configured export format settings.
• Fixed an issue in Update Actuals where Project actuals were not being properly distributed during the update process.

Admin users can now create daily, weekly and monthly schedules as well as select a time to run the schedule using Automated Data Management integration to publish Plan data from Apptio Planning to Apptio Costing (Cost Transparency). Additionally, users can also specify a period in Apptio Costing for which the data should be published.

This enhancement eliminates the need for manual data publishing and streamlines the data integration process between Planning and Costing. Automated Data Management (ADM) will be upgraded on September 4, 2024, to enable scheduling for publishing plan data to Apptio Costing.

For more information, see Schedule Publishing Plan Data.

• The "Update Actuals" feature was found to have a bug where actuals data was not being updated as expected, despite the operation reporting success.
• We have resolved an issue where the summary row totals for Base Compensation (Labor tab), Contract Amount (Contract tab), and Purchase Price (Asset tab) displayed incorrect values when multi-currency was enabled. Previously, the totals were inaccurate due to improper currency conversion. The calculation logic has been updated to ensure that, with multi-currency enabled, the summary row totals for Base Compensation, Contract Amount, and Purchase Price are now correctly calculated using the average Plan Rate for the selected currency. The average Plan Rate is determined by averaging all plan rates for a specific currency over the duration of the plan.
• Resolved an issue where updating actuals with multi-currency enabled resulted in an error. The issue occurred when actual line items contained multiple transactions in different currencies for the same "Cost Object," "Cost Center," and "Account."
• Fixed the issue where month, quarter, and year data were not visible in the Expenses > New View. If you still can't see these columns, follow these steps: Click the Layout button and select "Reset columns to default layout." This should display all the period columns (months, quarters, and year). Once the columns are visible, go to Layout > Public Layout > Default Layout, and click "Save" to save the changes to the default layout.

In Planning release 3.74, we have introduced a new feature allowing Admin users to exclude specific Labor Allocation Rules from the fully burdened labor calculation in the Labor tab. This enhancement ensures that these rules will still generate financial line items on the Summary tab but will not affect the FY totals displayed in the Labor tab.

Previously, in Planning release 3.71, we enhanced the budget owner's ability to view the fully burdened labor cost directly in the Expenses > Labor > FY Total column, eliminating the need to navigate to the Expenses > Summary section. For more details, please visit the 3.71 release notes.

• Budget owners will now see the "Fully Burdened Cost" for the fiscal year correctly displayed as the sum of all generated costs from actual periods and the generated costs from forecast periods. Previously, the absence of Labor actuals led to the Fully Burdened Fiscal Year column displaying amounts significantly lower than the Base Compensation amount in Forecast plans. With this fix, actual periods are calculated using the Labor Allocation Rules and included in the fully burdened "Labor Cost" amounts in the Labor tab; however, financials are not generated for historical periods in the Summary tab.

The Expenses Table in the New View now offers enhanced customization capabilities, including the ability to customize column structure, grouping, filters, and save changes as a layout. Individual users can create up to 50 private layouts, while admin users can create up to 50 public layouts. This represents an increase from the previous limit of 30 layouts in both public and private settings in the Expenses Legacy View.

In a future release later this year, users will also gain the ability to sync existing layouts from the Expenses Legacy View to the New View, ensuring continuity and ease of transition.

For more information, please refer to Table Layouts.

• Resolved a bug that prevented comparison values from updating when navigating to a specific Department from the Status page with a comparison active.
• Fixed a bug where using the Matching Fiscal Years alignment method to add a comparison caused the comparison values to display as blank.
• Corrected an issue where the error message for adding a duplicate Project Code incorrectly displayed as "Server error, please try again."

The Expenses table now supports full-screen mode. This setting allows users to maximize screen space for efficiently viewing and editing expense lines. Note that, the New View table experience is required to enable full-screen mode.

For more information, please refer to Working with Apex line items.

Users can now delegate contract expenses to a different cost center starting from a specified date. This enhancement allows for accurate allocation of expenses to the appropriate cost center. For projects with multiple phases (e.g., build/run), delegating expenses to specific cost centers aids in tracking the financial performance of each project phase effectively.

For more information, please refer to Delegate Project Costs.

Integrated Investment Planning now supports a Fixed Monthly Working Calendar, which allows users to set a fixed total number of work hours per month. This feature allows for converting FTE labor activity allocations to hourly labor activity allocations.

For more information, please refer to Working Calendar.

• Previously, when actuals were empty on the Spend Management page and a user attempted to update actuals on the plan for all months with empty actuals, the forecast plan lines were not deleted as expected. This issue has now been fixed.
• Fixed an appearance and resolution issue with the Apptio logo in automated messages used to inform users of Plan workflow updates.
• Implemented a fix to ensure that when Base Compensation and Labor Allocation Rules are not present, the FY total columns in the Labor tab correctly

Budget owners can now easily view the fully burdened labor cost directly in the Expenses > Labor > FY total columns, eliminating the need to navigate to the Expenses > Summary section for this information. Previously, this column only displayed Base Compensation x Quantity.

For example, in the Labor tab, you can see a labor line with a FY24 total of USD 196,888. This amount represents the fully burdened labor cost calculated based on the configured Labor Allocation Rules.

The fully burdened labor cost is the sum of the general ledger accounts generated from Labor Allocation Rules in the Summary tab. As shown, the FY24 total in the Summary tab matches the FY24 total in the Labor tab.

This release contains system maintenance updates.

This release contains system maintenance updates.

It Is now possible to select multiple expense lines and delete then in a single click using the Expenses > New View.

For more information, see Bulk Delete Expenses

The dashboard and summary charts have been renamed to Spend Breakdown, Spend Waterfall, Spend Tends and Spend Variances, respectively.

This release contains system maintenance updates.