Recalculate project finances

Last update: February 28, 2025

Topics:
Work Management

CREATED FOR:

User

Finances are calculated on a project as changes occur in the hours logged for the project or in the rates used to calculate costs and revenue.

Access requirements

Expand to view access requirements for the functionality in this article.

You must have the following access to perform the steps in this article:

Adobe Workfront plan	Any
Adobe Workfront license	New: Standard or Current: Plan
Access level configurations	Edit access to Projects and Financial Data
Object permissions	Manage permissions to the project with permissions to Manage Finance

For more detail about the information in this table, see Access requirements in Workfront documentation.

Considerations about calculating finances in Adobe Workfront

Finances are calculated in Enhanced analytics in the following ways:

You can manually recalculate costs and revenues on a project, by using the Recalculate Finance option on a project.
In addition, some actions trigger an automatic recalculation.

When the rate of a user or a role changes during the life of a project, the following can occur:

When the change is made, the updated rate is used from that point on as hours are logged and the financial information is calculated. Changing the rate does not affect how things were calculated before the change was made. For all the existing hours logged, the old rate is used to calculate financial information.
You can force Adobe Workfront to use the new rate retroactively for all the hours logged so far, by using the Recalculate Finance option. This forces Workfront to retroactively recalculate all previously entered hours, planned costs, and revenues in accordance with the new rate information.

The report type Project (Financial Data) does not automatically perform a recalculation of your financial data. To update the data in this report type, you must manually recalculate the finances on individual projects.

CAUTION

Prior to manually recalculating finances for a given project, you may want to preserve any financial data that has already been calculated at a previous rate. We recommend using the Recalculate Finance option only when you are sure that you are not making changes to existing information, or only when such changes are desired.

Preserve financial data for tasks with existing hours

When financial data for a project is recalculated, Workfront retroactively recalculates all previously logged hours, planned, actual costs, and planned and actual revenue, in accordance with any new or updated financial information.

Preserve Project Revenue
Preserve Project Cost

Preserve Project Revenue

Revenue rates can change during the lifetime of a project.

For more information about billing rates and revenue, see the article Overview of Billing and Revenue.

Revenue rates can change at the following levels:

The system level (for job roles)
For more information about creating job roles with billing rates at the system level, see the article Create and manage job roles.
The user level
For more information about changing the billing rate information on users, see the article Edit a user’s profile.
The Company level (for job roles)
For more information, see Override job role billing rates at the company level.
The Project level (for job roles)
For more information about overriding job role rates at the project level, see the article Overview of overriding Job Role Billing Rates and calculating Revenue on a project.

For example, a user’s billing rate changes during the course of a project from $50 to $75 an hour and you want all existing data to remain calculated at the old rate ($50 and hour). However, when the project finances are recalculated, tasks that already have existing financial data will have the revenue updated to reflect the new billing rate (of $75 an hour).

Preserve Project Revenue by creating a Billing Record
Preserve Project Revenue by using multiple Billing Rate overrides

Preserve Project Revenue by creating a Billing Record

When billing rates change at any level mentioned above, you can preserve existing revenue which has already been calculated on the project by avoiding to use the manual Recalculate Finance option or by locking the time recorded on the project and calculated using the old rate into a billing record with a status of Billed.

When you do not recalculate finances on the project or when you lock the hours logged into a billed billing record, the hours logged after the rate changes will calculate with the new rate, and the hours logged before the cost rate changes remain calculated at the old rate.

For more information about creating billing records, see the article Create billing records.

Preserve Project Revenue by using multiple Billing Rate overrides

When billing rates change for job roles at the project level, you can preserve existing revenue which has already been calculated on the project by using multiple billing rates overrides which are locked within a specified time frame.

For more information about using multiple billing rates overrides, see the article Overview of overriding Job Role Billing Rates and calculating Revenue on a project.

NOTE

This only applies to job role billing rates that are changed at the project level.

Preserve Project Cost

Cost rates can change at the following levels:

System level (for job roles)
For more information about creating job roles with cost rates at the system level, see the article Create and manage job roles.
User level
For more information about changing the cost rate information on users, see the article Edit a user’s profile.

When billing rates change at any level mentioned above, you can preserve existing costs which have already been calculated on the project by locking the time recorded on the project and calculated using the old rate into a billing record with a status of Billed. For more information about creating billing records, see the article Create billing records.

You can also avoid using the manual Recalculate Finance option, if you don’t want to create a billing record, as described in the section Manually recalculate finances for a project in this article.

When you do not recalculate finances on the project or when you lock the hours logged into a billed billing record, the hours logged after the rate changes will calculate with the new rate, and the hours logged before the cost rate changes remain calculated at the old rate.

Manually recalculate finances for a project

If your rates change during the life of a project and you want your cost and revenue calculations to reflect the new rates, you must manually recalculate the finances on the project.

NOTE

You can prevent revenue values from updating to reflect the new rates when you manually recalculate finance by following the steps in the section Preserve financial data for tasks with existing hours of this article. Cost values are always updated to reflect the new rates when you manually recalculate the finances on a project.

You can recalculate the finances of projects in Workfront from the project page or from a project list or report.

You can recalculate the finances while editing them in bulk. For information, see the Manually recalculate finances in bulk section in this article.

Go to the project where you want to recalculate finances and click the More icon to the right of the project name.

Or

Go to a project list or report and select one or several projects, then click the More icon at the top of the list.

TIP
Depending on the complexity of your projects, we recommend not to select a large number of projects when recalculating their finances in bulk to ensure optimum performance. Some things that could make a project too complex might be multiple dependencies or assignments or a large number of custom fields.
Click Recalculate Finance.

All planned costs and revenue on the project are recalculated with any new information.

You should receive a confirmation at the top of the browser that the finances of the project have been recalculated successfully.
Existing cost values and some revenue values which have not been locked update to reflect the new rates.

Manually recalculate finances in bulk

You can manually recalculate the finances of several projects by editing them in bulk. This causes the revenue on the projects to recalculate retroactively.

IMPORTANT

You can prevent revenue values from updating to reflect the new rates when you manually recalculate finance by following the steps in the section Preserve financial data for tasks with existing hours of this article. Cost values are always updated to reflect the new rates when you manually recalculate the finances on projects.

To manually recalculate the finances of several projects:

Go to a list of projects.
Select several projects in the list, then click the More icon at the top of the list.

TIP
Depending on the complexity of your projects, we recommend not to select a large number of projects when editing them in bulk to ensure optimum performance. Some things that could make a project too complex might be multiple dependencies or assignments or a large number of custom fields.
Click Recalculate Finance.

All planned costs and revenue on the selected projects are recalculated with any new information.

You should receive a confirmation at the top of the browser that the finances of the projects have been recalculated successfully.

Actions that trigger an automatic recalculation of finances

The following actions trigger the financial recalculation of projects in Workfront:

Changing task status
Moving a task with hours to another project
Changing the project status from Complete to an active status

NOTE

When you change the project status, only the planned values are being recalculated.

You can also recalculate finances manually under the More menu at the project level, by clicking Recalculate Finances.

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