Now I am going to explain how to read the Cost Report and how to filter, save, and export it for reporting and reviews. The Cost Report gives you a complete financial picture of your project, including actual costs, your PO commitments, your estimates, and how they all line up against your budget.

Let’s look at the specific columns:

• Actual Period: Shows costs incurred only within a specific date range.
• Actual to Date: The total costs incurred from the start of the project up until today. This represents your entire real spending so far.
• PO Commits: The remaining value of approved, open purchase orders. These are committed costs that have not yet been spent. Think of this as reserved money that has been spoken for.
• Total Cost: This is the sum of ‘Actuals to Date’ plus your ‘PO Commits’.
• Est to Complete (ETC): This is the estimated remaining cost needed to finish your project. As if you don’t know what vendor you are paying yet, but you need to reserve spending for that line item, this is where you do that. Sometimes, locations or equipment you haven’t received a quote for, this is where you can input this. Later on, once you have the actual vendor and the actual cost, you convert this to PO and the amount moves to the PO commit column.
• Est Final Cost (EFC): This is the projected final cost of the project; it is your ‘Total Cost’ plus your ‘ETC’.
• Locked Budget: The approved budget amount, locked. You shouldn’t ever be changing this amount.
• Overages: Any cost that exceeds the locked budget. These should be reviewed and approved.
• Final Budget: This is the original Locked Budget plus all approved Overages. So this means this is the total allowed amount you can spend up to.
• Over/Under: Shows if the project is forecasted to finish over or under budget on a per line item basis and also grand total basis, you can see the grand total at the very bottom. A positive number means under budget, while a negative number means over budget.
• Variance: Compares the current forecast against a previous saved version to highlight what has changed since the last review.

A very neat feature we have in our coast report is the Search bar to quickly find cost codes. You can also use the Date Range Selector to change the current look at ‘Actual Period’ and ‘Actual to Date’ columns.

To track progress over time, click Save Version, and it will create a snapshot of the current report state. This allows you to later on compare against previous versions.

Finally, to share the report, click Export Cost Report. The system will generate a PDF version that you can download and save.