Calendar Sets

Cobra uses calendar sets for spreading budgets, rolling wave calculation, current period reporting, and time-phased reports.

• Spreading budget — If you want to enter budget for planning packages by fiscal period, you can designate the calendar set on the cost class. If you have planning packages that last several years, you could reduce the size of your data substantially by not saving monthly data.
• Rolling wave — Set 01 is used to match the monthly calendar to the weekly calendar.
• Current period reporting — The status date and the previous period are stored in set 18 for CPR reporting.
• Time-phased reports — Each calendar set allows for specification of the label (column heading in a report or the Time-phase dialog box for each period reported, and to flag the periods to be reported on, such as monthly, quarterly, or yearly).

Default Calendar Sets

• Calendar Set 00 — This set is labeled with the options selected in the New Calendar wizard. All periods in set 00 must be labeled and flagged with $ or fixed flags.
• Calendar Set 01 — This set has all periods labeled and allows you to flag the most commonly reported periods. These flags can be either fixed or floating flags.

Note: Label the first 12 periods of Calendar set 01 with floating flags (*) for easy reporting of the next 12 periods.

For the rolling wave process, set 01 contains the labeled and flagged periods that represent the base calendar (monthly calendar) dates defined in the calendar for the program for which the rolling wave process will be performed. The set 01 is compared between the two calendars to determine what the month end date is. If these periods are not labeled the same, Cobra does not know what the month end is.

Note: You cannot share a rate file with projects that are not weekly because the FTE rates are updated in the rolling wave process.

• Calendar Set 18 — This set labels the first period of a new calendar PREVIOUS and the next period TODATE. These labels in set 18 are used to determine the status date of a project as well as what constitutes the current period (TODATE-PREVIOUS). As you advance the calendar, PREVIOUS and TODATE are moved automatically.

  For CPR* and CSSR* reports, set 18 needs PREVIOUS flagged at the beginning of the month and TODATE flagged at the end of the month to get a monthly report.

• Calendar Set 19 — This is used for CPR 4 and CPR 3 reports. These reports are typically labeled and flagged with a combination of floating and fixed flags which match the header of the report.

Floating and Fixed flags

In addition, it is common to report the next 12 periods. To facilitate this, Cobra provides two types of flags: fixed ($) and floating (*). Cut-off dates with fixed flags define periods absolutely; a calendar set for reporting fiscal year data would use fixed flags to define the year-end dates. By contrast, dates with floating flags define periods that are relative to the current project status date. Cobra automatically advances floating flags to the next labeled period each time the project calendar is advanced. By using a floating flag, it is possible, for example, to single out a specified number of accounting periods for the purpose of a look-ahead report in which the months displayed in the report automatically change each time you advance the project status date.

You can specify the labels for each flagged date in a calendar set. This makes it easy to see which accounting period is being defined by a particular cut-off date.