Payment Planner

Modified on Mon, 16 Jun at 4:01 PM

The Payment Planner modal has several functional sections:

Assign Payment Plans to a project
Project Variables
Documents
Import from Schedule
Sync with Schedule
Load to Registers
Delete
Invoice
Close
Sync with Budget
Exit
Payment Plan Grid

Assigning Payment Plans to a Project

Payment Planner allows the Project Manager to link a single or multiple Payment Plan(s) with the project. The project manager can decide how the payment plan for their project is gathered, a manual payment can be entered or the PM can import costs from the project schedule by task or by the distributed costs using the distribution curve.

On selecting Payment Planner from the drop-down project dash-board you are presented with the following modal.

To add a Payment Plan, click on ADD at the top of the screen.

Clicking on ADD redirects the user to the “Payment Plan Details” pop-up tab.

Click on the drop-down arrow of the right of the Please select a Payment Plan Type and you will be presented with a drop-down list of the available payment plans set-up by the system administrator.

If the payment plan selected is already active for that project you are then prompted to enter the Change Request ID, this provides the link to the Baseline Change Control register for the project so that the invoices costs, revenue and billings to be issued for this change request are treated differently to the original payment plan for the project.

Selecting a pre-configured Payment Plan from the list and clicking Save will result in the selected Payment Plan becoming visible on the dashboard, as per the screenshot above. 

Clicking on the hyperlink for the Payment Plan will take you to the Payment Plan screen, where a blank Payment Plan is visible, with a Payment Plan tab and a Project Summary tab.

When adding a Payment Plan, the fields configured in the payment plan for each section will be displayed. These fields are organised into four sections:

Section 1, which will be displayed in the main Payment Planner grid.

Section 2, which will be displayed in the INVOICE modal.

Section 3, which will be display in the Project Summary modal.

Section 4, which will be displayed on the Project Variables Page.

Project Variables

When entering the Payment Planner - Project Payment Plan modal for the first time a number of the menu options are greyed out. The reason for this is that the PM must first select the PROJECT VARIABLES menu option from the top of the grid-menu-bar.

On clicking on the PROJECT VARIABLES the user is presented with the project variables pop-up box.

In this pop-up the fields configured by the system administrator as SECTION 4 project variables are displayed and the project default values are entered. This enables the PM to set the standard rates that will be used in the fields calculations of the other three DATA SECTIONS. There must be a least one project variable set in the section 4 and if not used, this field can be set by the PM to ZERO.

Sample Project Variables are:

Project Margin %
Project Withheld %
Maximum Amount Withheld

The user enters the default values and selects the SAVE button.

The Project Payment Plan modal is then refreshed and several menu options are now available for selection.

On the top of the grid menu bar the following are now available for selection:

DOCUMENTS
PROJECT VARIABLES
SYNC WITH SCHEDULE
IMPORT FROM SCHEDULE

On the bottom of the modal menu bar the following are now available for selection:

LOAD TO REGISTERS
DELETE
INVOICE (still greyed out - will only become visible when a payment line status changes from “Pending”).
CLOSE (still greyed out - will only become visible when all payment line items are invoiced).
SYNC WITH BUDGET
EXIT

Documents

On selecting DOCUMENTS from the menu bar you are presented with the following modal.

This document modal provides the PM with the ability to upload and store documents against the project payment plan.

The use of the DOCUMENT model is outlined in the USER GUIDE for DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT.

Import From Schedule

On selecting IMPORT FROM SCHEDULE from the menu bar you are presented with the following modal.

The tasks from the Project Gantt are displayed in this selection grid.

Click on the TICK-BOX to select the TASK line you wish to import into the Payment Planner.

Import Logic Rules

The source of data that is displayed in the IMPORT modal is from the Gantt.

A TASK is imported first and then data is kept consistent by the SYNC functionality.

If you select a child TASK all ancestors are GREYED out from selection and only import the planned resource costs from the CHILD selected.

If you select a PARENT then all its ancestors and its descendants are GREYED OUT from selection and only import the values from the PARENT selected, which is a summary of the planned resource costs values of all the children including the specific planned resource costs of the parent.

IF Costs by Period enabled a task on the Gantt will be imported with the totals of cost fields imported based on the distribution curves of the planned resources of the TASK. A TASK period cost will not be imported if the task has ZERO planned resources assigned for that period.

IF Costs by Period disabled a task on the Gantt will be imported with the totals of costs fields for that task imported.

It is recommended that you do not allocate planned resources at parent levels. If you have a requirement to allocate planned resources at parent levels, create a TASK under the parent level and allocate your planned resources to this task.

If using the Rate Matric functionality, if the Gantt is displaying the icon on the task to indicate that the planned resources of that task has a period where the rate matrix value is not set for that period, that period cost will not be imported into the payment planner grid.

Sync With Schedule

When you enter the Payment Plan for a project after importing the following modal is displayed which will display the breakdown of tasks that have been already imported. If changes have been made on the Gantt to tasks that have already been imported the payment planner grid line will display in PINK and text in RED to indicate that the payment plan data and the Gantt data are out of sync. If you hover with the mouse over the PINK BOX a tool-tip message of “This value is outdated and should be synched with schedule”.

On selecting SYNC WITH SCHEDULE from the menu bar, the data in the GRID is synched with the Gantt and the GRID data is refreshed.

The following changes on the Gantt will be detected by the SYNC check:

Changes to cost or distribution curves for the task planned resources
Movement of a task
Deletion of a task
Change of date on the task
Change to Milestone details of a task

Load to Registers

The load to registers functionality enables the transfer of data from the payment planner into Project Forecasting Advanced via the Aggregate Register functionality within PPM.