changing timeline to account for different types of accounting months?

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From: L Kelly (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 02/09/04 

Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 06:03:36 -0800

Question regarding MS Project Timeline:

My company recently changed to an accounting system where
each month ends on the 4th Sunday of each month as opposed
to the last friday of the month. As far as I know, MS
Project only deals with actual calendar months.

Example - schedule is baselined as normal (so Jan 31 is
the end of the calendar month in Project). January 2004
accounting-wise really ends on Jan 25, 2004. So the week
of Jan 26-30 is really in the accounting month of
February. So any work not completed by Jan 25 has to be
moved to start after Jan 31. This causes a week schedule
slip compared to the baseline which finishes Jan 31. We
have had to go back and readjust the baseline spread to
move this week of baseline into February to avoid charging
the program an unfair week's slip of the schedule for any
of those tasks. We now have to do this every month where
the 4th Sunday of the month is not the end of the month or
when it's the end of the quarter.

We were afraid this is the only way to fix this when
establishing the baseline but does anyone know a way to
change MS Project calendar to match an accounting calendar
(that's different from the real calendar) like this
without having to set the task dates in the next month?
Back to my example - I don't want the tasks for Jan 26-30
to have to be set in actual month of February when I
baseline because that doesn't help the project team manage
their schedule correctly. They will be doing the work the
week of Jan 26-30 and schedule dependencies need to be set
correctly based on the actual dates.

Any insight would be most helpful! THANKS!

Relevant Pages

  • Re: changing timeline to account for different types of accounting months?
    ... Project is not really an accounting program. ... >> Project only deals with actual calendar months. ... >> slip compared to the baseline which finishes Jan 31. ... >> the program an unfair week's slip of the schedule for ...
    (microsoft.public.project)
  • Re: changing timeline to account for different types of accounting months?
    ... Project is not really an accounting program. ... Leave Project aligned with the real calendar. ... This causes a week schedule ... > slip compared to the baseline which finishes Jan 31. ...
    (microsoft.public.project)
  • Re: Stop Project from changing Start/End dates
    ... you could wait until February and get the calendar for $5! ... > It's changing those dates because the schedule will always reflect what ... > orginal plan was supposed to be, that is the purpose of a Baseline plan ... The baseline preserves a snapshot ...
    (microsoft.public.project)
  • Re: Creating a calendar with varying weeks per month
    ... we are on a fiscal year calendar that goes from Oct. 1 to ... What you are looking for is an accounting month calendar and it looks ... I have written an excel spreadsheet to compute ... exporting total hours for a given task for a given person (resource). ...
    (microsoft.public.project)
  • Re: changing timeline to account for different types of accounting months?
    ... John's approach, unless I'm missing something, is to dump the data into ... Project for accounting purposes I'm having a conceptual problem with ... ... > We have to move any uncompleted work for that week into ...
    (microsoft.public.project)