Bar chart projection feature

RayRay_H

Hi everyone,

I am using grouped bar chart to present actual and budget financial data and try to project the next 3 month's data. Please see the following chart as an example.

I have the following question:

Why it only projected Actual data but not budget data. The following is my multi-period projection properties if it helps to answer my question:

After I ticked the Last Item Complete box in Multi-Period Projection properties , I can see the projected data for Budget data. please see the following pictures:

So my question is that: why ticking the Last Item Complete box will determine whether the Budget number will be projected or not?

marcel_luthi

Sadly the documentation about this feature seems to be outdated and does not include information on this option. Based on your screenshots my best assumption is that it looks at which periods have data up to the end of the period and then selecting this box or not determines whether to any actual for the current period should they append any projections for the remaining of the period. Since September only started, most likely you only have a couple of entries up to today for actuals, but the budget most likely has entries going up to the end of the month, so it sees it as completed and therefore it won't project anything for it (the fact that it doesn't projects anything for the months after does seem to be a problem and I'd advise you to open a ticket with support to have it further reviewed, I could kind of imagine if all budget items are entered with the EOM date how that could be causing the system to work on them in a weird way when trying to project).

marcel_luthi

Sadly the documentation about this feature seems to be outdated and does not include information on this option. Based on your screenshots my best assumption is that it looks at which periods have data up to the end of the period and then selecting this box or not determines whether to any actual for the current period should they append any projections for the remaining of the period. Since September only started, most likely you only have a couple of entries up to today for actuals, but the budget most likely has entries going up to the end of the month, so it sees it as completed and therefore it won't project anything for it (the fact that it doesn't projects anything for the months after does seem to be a problem and I'd advise you to open a ticket with support to have it further reviewed, I could kind of imagine if all budget items are entered with the EOM date how that could be causing the system to work on them in a weird way when trying to project).

PhoenixDev

The reason the budget projections are not showing up, unless the 'Last Item Complete' is checked, is that there is not enough data to calculate a regression line for the projection. In order to calculate the regression line (projected values), you must have at least 2 full periods of data. When the 'Last Item Complete' is not checked, it assumes there is only one valid full period to work with which isn't enough to calculate a projection using the regression method. Hope that makes sense!

RayRay_H

Thanks all for the answers!