Milestones Forecast Dates Aligning to Your Calendar

The Billing and Revenue Fixed Fee % complete rules are pretty handy in OpenAir to allow Project Managers or Project Owners to control completion of milestones which will trigger invoicing and revenue. By setting the milestone to 100%, a typical approach, allows the project owners to control the ‘when’ for actuals. Forecasting, however, must rely on something that OpenAir can see so the milestone date is the main driver when reviewing forecasted billing and revenue.

Milestones are essentially tasks in OpenAir with 0 hours. Because there is a task ‘aspect’ to a milestone, OpenAir will view the milestone as something that can be worked on. When using milestones you generally don’t assign people so you can just treat the milestone as open or closed (0% or 100%, respectively). If you are forecasting the milestone, one thing to keep in mind is that the date of the milestone must be on a working day according to your calendar. Why? If you set the date on the milestone to a Saturday and Saturday is not a working day in your calendar, OpenAir will automatically move the date of the milestone in the forecast and on the project task view to the following working day (Monday, for many customers). The task is something that could be ‘worked’ and therefore the date of the milestone pays attention to the work calendar.

Consider this when you set dates on milestones that are on or near the end of the month. A great example is a milestone set to March 31, 2012. This is a Saturday so for many of you this milestone would adjust its date to be Monday April 2, 2012. This makes the difference in forecasting March or April revenue!!

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