About Time Periods, Work Calendars, and Holidays

In PSA time periods, work calendars, and holidays provide a structure for creating resource schedules and assignments, entering hours on timecards, and viewing the resulting calculations.

What are Time Periods?

Time periods allow you to define date ranges for which your company can report its planned, actual, utilization, and forecasting information. Once set up, time periods define time dimensions for tracking and reporting your planned, actual and variance numbers for the different time periodClosed A period of time with a start date and an end date to which forecasts, actuals calculations, billing event batches, utilization calculations and region plans belong. reportable entities in the organization. You must enter at least one time period called All Time Periods. You can then add years, quarters, months and weeks according to your requirements.

Your organization will use time periods to forecast and track actuals in each RPGClosed Abbreviation of region, practice, group.. For example, you may want to run Billing Forecasting against quarters or years, and then track actuals by months.

For instance, if your organization's regions plan, forecast and report in quarters, you can create time periods for all quarters into the foreseeable future (as well as years, months and weeks if desired). If, at a given point in time, you are interested in the performance of your regionClosed A level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects. in Q3, Year 2009, you can then set the region's Current Time Period to Q3 FY2009, select the Update Current Time Period box, and save the region. You then see that quarter's current plan, actuals, utilization and backlog numbers for that region and time period.

Note:

Week time periods can span months, quarters and years. When setting up a time period, check the start and end date for weeks with boundaries that span other time periods. Actuals for weeks that cross these boundaries might not be included in larger time period reporting. In PSA you can define weeks that are less than seven days, so that they align with year, month and quarter boundaries.

Set up all the time periods that you require in advance including time periods well into the future.

What is a Work Calendar?

A work calendarClosed A calendar that defines the working days, hours and public holidays for a resource, region, practice or group. defines the default number of hours for each day in the week to carry over to resource schedules when creating assignments (usually eight hours a day, Monday through Friday).

What is a Holiday Object?

A holiday defines the number of hours to be worked on a specific holiday, usually zero. Holidays are placed into the designated work calendar. Depending on the configuration that your administrator has set, holidays are carried over to schedules when creating resource assignments. For more information, see Assignment Settings and Self-Assignment Settings.