Clarity

  • 1.  Financial enablement what is possible and what is not?

    Posted Nov 02, 2015 10:16 AM

    How many loops I've been looking at financial enablement every now and then and the last time I made a more comprehensive review was in v12.0

    At that time what the documentation said and what the product did was not an exact match.

    One of the things was that if you tried to create a financial plan for a project which was not financially enabled you got an error and could do that.

     

    Now on v13.3 that requirement has apparently been relaxed and financial enablement as we knew it before is not required to create a financial plan - at least you do not get and error if you open the Financial Plans tab and click add for a project that has no location or department which are no longer required fields.

    The reason for bringing this up is that the financial enablement is still required for the transactions to be processed other wise they will stop at the Invalids and you financial plans will never be updated actuals from imported transactions.

     

    So that appears to be half way. Better would be either or: Either you can do both plans and transaction for projects that are not financially enabled or you can't do either.

     

    The documentation in v13.3 does not pass UAT

     

    CA Clarity PPM project management user guide

     

    Financially Enable Projects

    To use detailed financial planning and process financial transactions, financially enable your project.

    For more information, see the Financial Management User Guide.

     

    CA Clarity PPM financial management user guide

     

    How to Set Up Detailed Financial Planning

    To build financial plans, the following must be set up:

    An entity must exist (see page 13).

    Fiscal time periods must be defined and activated at the entity level.

     

    An investment must exist.

     

    For more information, see the Project Management User Guide.

    The investment must be financially enabled.

     

    For more information, see the Project Management User Guide.


    Not entirely true and how many times are you expected to do the loop?


    As John_George  says the documentation is getting better

     

    Financially Enable Projects

    Last update August 12, 2015

    You can process financial transactions for your project. Before you process financial transactions, enable your project to set up financial transaction defaults, such as specifying the project and cost matrices. The selections automatically populate transaction entries upon selecting the project. To enable a project for financial processing, set up the following items:

    • Define financial departments
    • Define financial locations
    • Associate departments to locations
    • Financially enable the projects

    The loop is just in one place and whether or not enablement is required for financial plans is not stated.



  • 2.  Re: Financial enablement what is possible and what is not?

    Posted Nov 02, 2015 01:12 PM

    Thanks Urmas for your feedback!

     

    If I understand correctly, you have pointed out a couple issues with the financial setup documentation. One, not all the related information is in one place. Second, the fact that financially enabling an investment is only needed for transaction processing (not for detailed financial planning) is not clearly stated. I am checking with an SME to verify the exact product behavior and will update the documentation as needed with the correct information. I will update you here based on my findings. As for the organization of the information, I am making a note to improve this in a future doc update.

     

    For the future, we encourage you to make all documentation-related comments on the related Wiki pages, rather than on the community. The Wiki allows us to collaborate with you much more efficiently.

     

    Best Regards,

     

    Sarmistha Purkayastha

     

     



  • 3.  Re: Financial enablement what is possible and what is not?

    Posted Nov 02, 2015 02:49 PM

    What I am saying is that you cannot say in the project management guide to look in financial management guide for financially enabling a project and in the financial management guide refer back to project management guide and in reality in neither one say what does it mean or what the steps are.

     

    While that was in v13.3 documentation which is not going to be updated it does not matter that much.

     

    What would be beneficial were also to specify what can be done when a project is financially enabled that cannot be done when a project is not financially enabled and what can a user do when the user's resource is financially enabled and what the user cannot do when the resource is not financially enabled and what user rights does it take.

     

    That seems to vary from version to version and in earlier versions the documentation on that was partly correct and partly incorrect. That did not seem to bother anybody.

     

    When the Wiki came there were limitations with the user access. Apparently comments are now possible.



  • 4.  Re: Financial enablement what is possible and what is not?

    Posted Nov 02, 2015 03:35 PM

    Hi Urmas,

     

    Yes, I agree that the way we had the information organized for this topic in the v13.3 and earlier versions wasn't useful at all. Even on the Wiki, while we are listing all the steps for financially enabling a project in one topic, we have not linked the information with the appropriate details. I am making a note of this issue and all the other missing pieces of information that you have identified in this post. I will create a backlog item to address these gaps in a future doc update.

     

    I appreciate you taking the time to provide us this feedback and helping us improve the documentation.

     

    For future feedback, please use the following links to Wiki:

    On Premise

     

    On Demand

     

     

    Regards,

     

    Sarmistha Purkayastha