Fiscal Calendar Overview

Cora PPM supports a configurable Fiscal Calendar. However, there are a number of gaps and limitations in how this feature is implemented across different parts of the system. Understanding these gaps is important before configuring the system, as they will affect what users can see and do in practice.

Fiscal Calendar Coverage

The system has a well-built Fiscal Calendar engine that powers period calculations across most of the application. When the Fiscal Calendar is enabled, it replaces the standard calendar month logic with custom fiscal periods defined by your organisation. This affects how financial data columns are labelled, how date ranges are calculated, and how periods are validated during data import. The fiscal calendar setting is a global switch — it is either on or off for the entire instance — and its periods are cached for performance.

The Fiscal Calendar is properly respected in the following areas:

• The Enterprise Financials module (the grid showing Estimates, Budgets, Forecasts, Actuals, and Commitments) correctly switches between standard monthly periods and fiscal periods when entering, displaying, and importing financial data.

• The Insights Pages (Portfolio Insights and Discipline Insights) correctly use fiscal period labels for grid column headers and exports when the fiscal calendar is enabled.

• Scenario Planning / What-If correctly detects the fiscal calendar setting and uses fiscal periods when shifting projects or editing demand across periods.

• The Import Builder / API (used to bulk-import financial values) validates incoming period numbers against the fiscal calendar.

However, there are meaningful gaps:

Gap 1 — The Enterprise Financials API (direct update endpoint) has no fiscal calendar awareness. When financial data is updated via the Enterprise Financials REST API (used for direct programmatic updates rather than the Import Builder), period values are passed and stored as raw integers. There is no validation or translation of those period values against the fiscal calendar. A period that does not exist in your configured fiscal calendar can be silently written to the database.

Gap 2 — The Insights Pages use fiscal calendar periods for column display but the underlying SQL stored procedures use integer period values. If those stored procedures do not align their period arithmetic with the fiscal calendar, data may be aggregated or displayed against the wrong time periods. The stored procedure logic is not included in the provided context, so this cannot be fully confirmed or ruled out from the available code.

Gap 3 — What-If Scenario Planning column manipulation does not fully protect fiscal period boundaries. When inserting or deleting months from a project's demand profile, the code converts the operation into a standard calendar month. This conversion does not use fiscal period lookups, meaning that if your fiscal periods do not align with standard calendar months, the inserted or deleted period may not correspond to the correct fiscal period.

Configuring and Verifying Fiscal Calendar Behaviour

Prerequisites:

• You must have System Administrator access.

• The Fiscal Calendar must be loaded with your organisation's periods before enabling it.

Steps:

1. Navigate to System Configuration → Financial Management Settings.

2. Confirm that Enable Fiscal Calendar is switched on and that Non-Standard Fiscal Periods is enabled if your fiscal year does not follow calendar months.

3. Navigate to Enterprise Financials for any project. Verify that the column headers show your fiscal period labels (e.g. "2024/01") rather than standard month names (e.g. "Jan 2024").

4. Navigate to Portfolio → Insights. Verify that the period column group headers reflect your fiscal periods.

5. Navigate to Scenario Planning (What-If). Open a project and confirm that the demand grid columns use fiscal period labels.

Known pitfalls and limitations to watch for:

• When importing financial data via the Import Builder API, always supply periods in the YYYYPP format that matches your configured fiscal calendar. For all financial types except Estimates, the system will reject periods that do not match. For Estimates, it will not validate the period — so incorrect values will be silently accepted.

• Do not use the Enterprise Financials direct update API to write period-specific data if your fiscal calendar uses non-standard periods. Period values passed to this API are not validated against the fiscal calendar and will be written as-is.

• When using the What-If column shift feature (inserting or deleting months from a project's demand timeline), be aware that the system performs this operation using standard calendar month arithmetic. If your fiscal periods span non-calendar boundaries, the result may not align with your expected fiscal periods.