The following is the list of Frequently Asked Questions related to the new financials experience in SPM for projects, demands and epics as part of the Project workspace and Strategic planning workspace.

This is a living document that will be constantly updated with latest FAQs based on the questions ServiceNow product team receives from the community.

1Q) I am not able to see the record financials page for the planning items in SPW. What could be the reason?

Ans: To be able to access the financials page for planning items in SPW, the required role is ‘sn_align_ws.spw_financial_user’.

Two other configurations which needs to be double checked for the financials page to be visible are –

1. Internal integrations need to be setup between the planning item table and the respective core tables for the record types. More info here

2. An active record for the planning item or core ppm table for the record type should be available in the investment entities table . Following page explains how to configure it for an epic planning item type - https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-it-business-management/page/product/spw-financials/task/enable-spw-fin-epic.html

2Q) I am an existing customer who want to allocate budget by cost type instead of by expense type that we have been using in the past. What are the things that need to be considered before making the switch?

Ans: Changing the budget attribute to ‘cost_type’ in your existing instance could have following impact:

1. If your existing instance is already using cost_type to identify costs of different categories like labor, software, hardware etc, update the cost type values to ‘IT Funded’ and ‘business funded’ will make the past data of cost plans in-consistent with future data.

2. If you had budget records by Capex, Opex in the past, changing the budget attribute to ‘cost_type’, will make the past budget records inconsistent with the future budget records which are allocated by ‘cost_type’. The project workspace UI will also show comparison of budget vs cost by ‘cost_type’ and so the past projects with budget given by expense type won’t have the budget comparison available. Your existing data needs to be looked at to see if there is possibility to handle the past data to be compatible with the new budget attribute. Alternatively, you can choose to go with new budget attribute from the beginning of a planning cycle with all new projects with budget allocated by cost type.

3Q) How can I compare actual costs with planned costs in the new financials experience?

Ans: In the new financials view, latest actual costs can be compared with estimated planned costs using the compare baselines capability. Create a financial baseline before the start of a project to compare the latest forecast data (actuals till last fiscal period and planned cost for current and future fiscal periods) with the initial forecast data with planned cost for all fiscal periods).

Therefore it’s important to create a financial baseline before the project has started execution and also on a periodic basis to keep track of the changes in the financials data.

Financial baselines can be created manually or automatically through a scheduled job ‘Create financial baseline for active projects and demands’.

4Q) How can one add more fields (ex: Vendor) from cost plans to the list view in the new financials page in Project Workspace?

Ans: Please refer the following documentation page: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/xanadu-it-business-management/page/product/pw-financials/task/customize-fin-left-pane-prj-wrkspc.html

5Q) How can one add more attributes (ex: Vendor) to the New cost plan form in the side panel of the new Financials page in Project Workspace?

Ans: Please refer the following documentation page:

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/xanadu-it-business-management/page/product/pw-financials/task/customise-cost-plan-form-fin-prj-wrkspc.html