Project Side Panel

Overview

The Project side panel consists of several sections where you can view and edit project information: Project Header, Details, Financial, Health, Custom Fields and Organizations (if enabled).

You can access the Project side panel from almost anywhere in Kantata OX by clicking on a project’s name. Common locations include:

• Your Dashboard
• The Activity Feed
• The Time Entries page
• The Expenses page
• The project workspace

Project Header

The Project side panel header contains the project name and a Go to project link that takes you directly to the project workspace when clicked. To close the side panel, click the Close (“   ”) icon or press Esc on your keyboard.

Details

The Details section gives you access to important details about your project, such as status, dates, associated groups and clients, and the project description.

• Status—Shows the project's current Status, which can be adjusted from the project workspace.
• Dates—Reflects the project Start and End Date. Any changes made to the schedule in the Project Settings or the Project Admin box are automatically reflected here.
• Estimated Completion Date—This date is estimated based on the Due Date of the last task to be completed in the project (i.e., the project task whose deadline is the furthest out). This date may differ from the planned End Date of the project.
• Groups—Shows any Groups or the Primary Group that has been added to the project.
• Client—Shows any Clients that have been added to the project.
  Note: To add a Client to this section, you must mark a specific Group as a Client. To do this, check the Is this group a client? box in the Group side panel.
• Description—Displays the contents of the Description field found in Project Settings. A good description contains a summary of the project plan which defines project issues, goals, overall objectives, and the tasks and resources required.

Financial

Team members with View and Edit Financials project permissions (or higher) can view the project’s total budget, the actual fees used, the EAC (Estimate at Completion), and the ETC (Estimate to Completion). This allows you to see how you’re tracking against your task budget and original hours estimate. Any changes made to the budget in the Project Settings or the Project Admin box are automatically reflected here.

• EAC (Estimate at Completion)—This is what has already been spent and is expected to be spent by the time the project is complete.
• ETC (Estimate to Complete)—This is the amount of money spent from the day of the week specified in the Project Estimate Calculation Options until the end of the project.
• Actual Fees—By default, this includes the hours that have been tracked towards the project to date. If you have selected the Include Expenses option in the Financials section of the Project Settings, actual fees also include expenses and additional invoice items. Actual fees may also include billable expenses and additional invoice items depending on the selections in the Financials section of Project Settings.

See the Project Completion Estimates article for more information about how these values are calculated.

When the bar is green, it means the project is under (or at) budget. If the bar is red, it means the project is over budget. The black vertical marker represents the current EAC. If you see the / / symbol, it means that EAC information can no longer be shown to scale on the bar. The project’s actual fees, budget remaining, and current budget are displayed below the bar.

Account Administrators can adjust the day on which EAC or ETC is calculated by clicking the Edit Settings link and then adjusting the Project Estimate Calculation Options on the Time & Expense Settings page.

The box to the right of the bar indicates whether your project is Under or Over budget, and by how much. The amount of Variance shown at the bottom of the box represents the difference between your EAC and your budget. The percentage is calculated by dividing the variance amount by the budget.

Health

Team members with Edit Financials project permissions (or higher) can document details about the overall health of a project’s schedule, scope, budget, and client status. This section gives you a visual, side-by-side comparison of your ten most recent health reports shown as a red, yellow, and green line graph.

Project health reports are often created by Provider Leads on a regular basis to track status over time and predict risks to pace, execution, and resourcing. As you add new health reports, they appear horizontally below the graph with the most recent date on the right. Click on each date to view details for that report.

Only one New Health Report can be created per day. Although you can delete a report at any time, you can only edit a report on the day that it was created.

Before saving a new health report, you must select a health color and provide a description. You then have the option to assign health colors and text for the project's current Schedule, Scope, Budget, and Client status:

• Green—Everything is on track.
• Yellow—Still on track, but needs attention.
• Red—Currently off track and needs attention.

The data from these health reports can be pulled into Insights to ascertain the health of all projects, identify areas of risk, and take advantage of other key features.

To export the health reports to a CSV or XLS document, select an option in the Export section.

Custom Fields

This section—only available with Kantata OX Premier and Enterprise plans—gives you access to additional custom information for the project (e.g., a project number), and displays all the Project Custom Fields (in alphanumeric order) previously created by an Account Administrator in Settings > Custom Fields.

Project Custom Fields can only be viewed if the field's Read Permissions are equal to (or greater than) the member's Project-level permissions. For example, a Project Custom Field with Read Permissions set to View / Edit Time & Expenses can be viewed by members with View Time and Expenses and Edit Time and Expenses access all the way up to Project Administrator.

Read or Write Permissions are managed by Account Administrators. All new Custom Fields in Project Sets default to being viewable by View / Edit Tasks and editable by Project Administrators.

Organizations

The Organizations section—visible only if Organizations are enabled for your account—allows you to select organizations based on department and/or geography.

These settings prevent members from voluntarily adding themselves to projects. Additionally, depending on the project’s Privacy settings, team members can invite others to join the project, regardless of the organization they belong to.