Release ProjectEngine v1.5.0 — Financial Project Controls & Multi-Project Management · TMailletFR/ProjectEngine

ProjectEngine v1.5.0 marks a major milestone in the evolution of the open-source Excel scheduling and project controls engine.

Following the interactive tutorial and modernized user experience introduced in v1.4, this release introduces an entirely new functional area: Financial Project Controls.

ProjectEngine now allows users to manage activity budgets, record actual expenses, estimate remaining costs, forecast final expenditure, and visualize financial performance directly alongside their project schedule.

The new Finance module also supports multi-project financial management, including independent, copied, and shared financial records, with consolidated reporting designed to prevent double-counting.

Beyond Finance, v1.5.0 delivers important improvements to Dashboard reporting, S-Curve calculations, project migration, worksheet customization, and Full Reset reliability.

ProjectEngine remains fully integrated into Microsoft Excel, with no additional application, database, subscription, or installation required.

💰 New Financial Project Controls Module

ProjectEngine now includes two dedicated worksheets:

FINANCE — Manage financial activities, budgets, expenditure, remaining estimates, and projected final costs.
FINANCE SUMMARY — Review financial totals, monthly expenditure, cumulative spending, and financial performance charts.

Financial activities are linked to the existing Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and consume calculated planning dates from the scheduling engine.

This connects financial reporting with the project schedule while keeping their calculation rules separate.

Activity-Level Cost Management

For each financial activity, ProjectEngine supports:

Budget — Planned expenditure assigned to the activity.
Actual — Recorded expenditure from the financial journal.
ETC (Estimate to Complete) — Estimated remaining cost.
EAC (Estimate at Completion) — Projected final expenditure.
Variance — Difference between planned and projected costs.
Progress — Existing activity progress from the WBS.
Start and Finish — Dates obtained from the planning engine.

Financial totals are consolidated across the relevant activities and projects without double-counting summary-level values.

The Finance module does not change the scheduling engine, dependencies, calendars, Critical Path, or existing planning analytics.

Flexible Budget Distribution

Three budget distribution profiles are available:

These profiles provide a simple way to represent different expenditure patterns.

Financial projections are organized into monthly periods, with amounts calculated and distributed to the cent.

The existing progress-based S-Curve retains its own calculation logic.

🏗️ Multi-Project Financial Management

One of the most significant additions in v1.5 is the ability to manage financial information for multiple projects within the same workbook.

Users can create and manage separate financial project contexts while retaining a consolidated view of their overall financial exposure.

Independent, Copied, and Shared Financial Records

ProjectEngine distinguishes three ways to associate financial information with projects:

Independent — Each project maintains its own budget, estimates, and financial transactions.
Copy — Existing financial information is used to create a separate, independent record.
Duplicate / Shared — Multiple project relationships reference the same underlying financial record.

Shared financial records remain connected rather than becoming separate copies.

This is particularly useful when an activity or cost item contributes to several projects but should not be counted multiple times.

Consolidated Global Reporting

The new Global view consolidates financial information across the different projects.

Its aggregation rules distinguish genuinely independent costs from shared financial records.

Shared records contribute only once to consolidated amounts.
Independent financial records remain additive.
Copied records are treated as distinct financial data.
Actual expenses and forecasts follow the corresponding consolidation rules.

This provides a more reliable overview of combined budgets and expenditures.

Persistent Financial Data

Switching between financial projects does not discard their information.

ProjectEngine stores the underlying financial domain separately from its visible worksheets, which display the selected project context.

This includes financial activities, relationships, expenses, and associated preferences.

The architecture supports the existing financial workflows without introducing multiple competing Finance calculation engines or storage authorities.

🧾 Expense Journal & Native Excel Editing

The new Finance module includes a dated expense journal for tracking actual expenditure.

Users can record:

Expense dates.
Positive expenditure.
Negative adjustments and credits.
Associated financial activities.
Optional comments.
Multiple entries for the same activity.

Native Excel Expense Entry

Expense management takes advantage of Excel's familiar editing capabilities.

A temporary FINANCE INPUT worksheet allows users to prepare entries directly in an Excel table.

Supported interactions include:

Direct cell editing.
Copy and paste.
Multiple-entry preparation.
Native filtering and sorting.
Financial activity selection.
Explicit confirmation or cancellation.

A compact, non-blocking instruction panel accompanies the input table.

Entries are validated before being committed to the Finance domain. Cancelled drafts do not modify the confirmed financial records.

Future-Dated Expenses

Future expenditure can be entered and retained in the financial journal.

Before confirmation, ProjectEngine displays a warning identifying the affected activities and their expense dates.

Future-dated amounts remain part of the recorded financial information but are excluded from the actual expenditure chart until the corresponding reference date is reached.

The user must refresh Finance to update the financial visualization.

No expense is silently deleted or re-dated.

Finance Extraction

A dedicated Extract Finance command creates a snapshot of the currently selected financial reporting information.

This allows users to preserve reporting states or work with extracted financial data without modifying the underlying records.

📊 New Financial Summary & Expenditure Charts

The FINANCE SUMMARY worksheet provides financial reporting at both monthly and cumulative levels.

Four financial series are available:

Monthly planned expenditure.
Cumulative planned expenditure.
Monthly actual expenditure.
Cumulative actual expenditure.

These charts allow project teams to compare expected spending with recorded costs throughout the project timeline.

Actual Expenditure at the Reporting Date

The actual expenditure chart respects the date of the last successful Finance refresh.

Future expenses remain recorded but are not displayed prematurely.
Expenses later in the current month are excluded until their date is reached.
Months without expenditure retain the previous cumulative amount.
Negative adjustments are represented correctly.
Planned expenditure continues across the complete financial reporting horizon.

A vertical reference line identifies the reporting date when it falls within the displayed timeline.

The existing Excel chart is reused during updates instead of being unnecessarily recreated.

Explicit Finance Refresh

Financial calculations are performed through Refresh Finance.

Opening the workbook, changing languages, or refreshing unrelated planning views does not silently recalculate Finance.

This maintains a clear distinction between financial reporting and scheduling operations and avoids unnecessary processing when the financial module is not being used.

🎛️ Finance Commands Integrated into the Excel Ribbon

The ProjectEngine Ribbon now includes four dedicated Finance commands:

Manage Activities — Select and maintain financial activities.
Manage Expenses — Prepare and commit financial transactions.
Refresh Finance — Recalculate the financial projections and reporting outputs.
Extract Finance — Create a reporting snapshot.

The commands use the existing contextual Ribbon architecture, with their icons embedded directly into the workbook.

Finance also supports:

English and French interfaces.
Independent Finance language settings.
Beginner and Expert terminology.
Integration with the existing shared translation system.

No separate Ribbon add-in is needed.

🔄 Enhanced Project Migration — SchemaVersion 3

ProjectEngine v1.5 introduces SchemaVersion 3 to support persistent financial data and multi-project relationships.

The existing migration workflow has been extended rather than replaced.

Financial Data Migration

Supported imports now preserve the relevant Finance domain, including:

Financial projects and activity relationships.
Shared and independent financial records.
Budgets and remaining-cost estimates.
Expense journals and signed transactions.
Supported financial preferences.

Older compatible ProjectEngine workbooks without Finance data remain supported.

Unsupported future schema versions are explicitly rejected instead of being silently interpreted as compatible.

Import remains a data-transfer operation: it does not automatically run the scheduling engine or Finance calculations.

Better Preservation of WBS Formatting

When importing an older project, ProjectEngine now preserves additional user-defined formatting in editable WBS cells.

Supported properties include:

Font family, size, color, bold, and italic.
Cell background colors and supported patterns.
Cell borders and their supported properties.

Calculated columns retain ProjectEngine's own presentation rules.

This helps users upgrade their projects without unnecessarily losing their worksheet customizations.

Custom Column Width Preservation

Project migration also preserves supported column widths in:

WBS.
Constraints.
Finance.
Finance Summary.

Widths are matched to the supported schema and restored at the appropriate stage of the migration process.

This prevents later worksheet presentation operations from unnecessarily overwriting imported column dimensions.

The improvement applies to supported columns and does not imply complete preservation of every Excel formatting property.

📈 Dashboard Reporting Improvements

ProjectEngine v1.5 improves the accuracy and reliability of Dashboard reporting.

More Representative Summary-Task Progress

The Dashboard's compact planning overview now uses a more meaningful time-based representation of summary-task progress.

Instead of mapping a summary activity's overall progress percentage directly across its entire duration, the visualization considers the actual daily coverage of its underlying activities.

This is particularly useful for summary tasks containing multiple overlapping activities or uneven progress distributions.

The calculation is limited to Dashboard presentation and does not redefine the planning engine's activity progress values.

Improved Progress Colors

Dashboard progress coloring is aligned more closely with the existing Gantt rendering rules.

This prevents one activity running ahead of schedule from incorrectly hiding the visual impact of another delayed activity.

The Dashboard reuses the Gantt's existing progress-classification logic rather than maintaining an independent copy.

Safer Dashboard Snapshots

Dashboard history receives stronger validation before new snapshots are committed.

Incomplete reporting data cannot be silently saved as a valid snapshot.

If a snapshot operation fails, the newly created entry is rolled back rather than leaving a partially recorded historical state.

Existing historical records are not automatically rewritten.

Fixed Repeated Errors After Project Import

Fixed an issue where the first Dashboard refresh after importing a project could generate repeated STOP messages.

The problem originated from a temporary dependency on Excel's data-validation controls while the Dashboard was rebuilding its selection interface.

The selection logic now validates against the existing snapshot history, allowing the rebuild and subsequent reporting operations to complete normally.

📉 S-Curve Calculation Reliability

Fixed a scenario where an otherwise eligible activity could prevent S-Curve calculation because its baseline timing was not explicitly available in the expected worksheet fields.

The S-Curve can now reuse the existing scheduling engine's baseline reconstruction when appropriate.

This ensures that eligible activities use the correct baseline dates rather than substituting forecast dates or being incorrectly omitted.

The existing validation rules remain unchanged:

Invalid weights remain blocking.
Unresolvable baseline timing remains an error.
Forecast dates are not treated as substitute baseline dates.
The existing S-Curve calculation and reporting semantics are preserved.

This is a targeted reliability improvement, not a new expenditure-distribution system for the progress S-Curve.

🛠️ Additional Reliability & Usability Improvements

More Complete Full Reset

The Full Reset workflow has been strengthened to remove obsolete data and presentation elements from the previous project.

The updated cleanup covers:

WBS and calculated planning results.
Gantt dependencies and persisted rendering caches.
Previous S-Curve results and charts.
Dashboard snapshots and selections.
Financial projects, relationships, budgets, expenses, and projections.
Finance extraction sheets.
Event History and warning acknowledgements.
Obsolete import metadata.
Previous tutorial progress and project-specific interface state.

Application infrastructure, supported settings, and the structures required for a new project are retained.

Full Reset remains an explicitly confirmed, destructive operation.

WBS Identifiers Preserved as Text

WBS and Predecessors WBS input columns now use Excel's Text number format.

This reduces unwanted automatic conversion of identifiers into dates or numbers during normal data entry and table expansion.

The existing input-validation rules remain unchanged.

A complete Excel paste may still transfer formatting from the source; Paste Values is recommended when destination formatting must be preserved.

More Reliable Import and Save

Corrected an import workflow that could fail during its final Excel save.

The previous process unnecessarily reconstructed and formatted an intermediate empty Finance state before replacing it with the imported records.

The import process now avoids this redundant operation while retaining its existing validation, data preservation, and final-save checks.

Interactive Tutorial Refinements

The interactive tutorial introduced in v1.4 has been extended to explain the new Finance capabilities.

Additional interface improvements provide more consistent page sizing and text presentation, including adjustments when switching between English and French.

The tutorial remains available directly inside Excel, with its existing Discovery and Practice workflows.

🔄 Upgrading from v1.4

ProjectEngine v1.5.0 includes a new persistent workbook schema to support the Finance module.

To upgrade an existing project:

Back up your current ProjectEngine workbook.
Download the new ProjectEngine_V1.5.xlsm asset from this release.
Open it in Microsoft Excel for Windows and enable macros if you trust the downloaded workbook.
Select Import Previous Project from the welcome screen or ProjectEngine Ribbon.
Choose your existing ProjectEngine workbook.
Review the imported WBS, Constraints, settings, and any available Finance information.
Run Planning Update or Full Update when you are ready to recalculate the schedule.
Use Refresh Finance separately when financial reporting is required.

The original source workbook is opened read-only and remains unchanged.

Import replaces supported project information in the destination workbook; it does not merge two unrelated workbooks.

Existing calculated outputs and visualizations can be regenerated with the new version.

✅ Validation & Compatibility

ProjectEngine v1.5.0 has undergone extensive functional, integration, and regression testing using a range of project configurations, including:

Standard project schedules covering everyday planning and financial workflows.
Large-scale schedules containing approximately 1,200 activities.
Complex scenarios designed to verify scheduling analytics, financial consolidation, and reporting consistency.

Validation covered:

Financial budgets, estimates, expenses, and credits.
Multi-project management and consolidated reporting.
Shared, copied, and independent financial relationships.
Financial journal persistence and transaction validation.
Project import and migration to SchemaVersion 3.
WBS formatting and column-width preservation.
Dashboard progress and snapshot integrity.
S-Curve baseline-resolution regression scenarios.
Full Reset and subsequent new-project workflows.
English and French interface behavior.
Preservation of existing planning functionality.

The updated components were also checked through VBA compilation, native Excel save/reopen tests, and targeted regression scenarios.

Testing was performed on Microsoft Excel for Windows. Not every configuration has been tested natively, including 32-bit installations, LTSC/perpetual editions, all display scaling configurations, and crash-recovery scenarios.

Performance measurements are scenario-specific; no universal improvement in scheduling or overall workbook execution speed is claimed.

❤️ Community Feedback

ProjectEngine continues to evolve through real-world feedback from its users.

The introduction of Financial Project Controls follows an idea shared by u/FlanAffectionate2691, who suggested adding task-level budget and actual-cost reporting, including different ways to distribute expenditure over time.

That suggestion helped inspire a much broader financial reporting capability, now delivered with multi-project management and consolidated reporting.

Thank you for sharing the idea and helping shape the direction of the project.

Feedback on financial workflows, reporting, usability, and real-world project controls is very welcome.

🚀 What v1.5 Means for ProjectEngine

ProjectEngine started with a simple objective: bring genuine dependency-driven project scheduling into Excel.

Version 1.5 expands that vision.

ProjectEngine now combines:

Scheduling · Gantt · Critical Path · Planning Analytics · S-Curve · Dashboard · Financial Project Controls · Multi-Project Reporting

The new Finance module adds cost visibility while preserving the distinction between schedule calculations, progress measurements, and financial reporting.

ProjectEngine remains:

Free and open source, licensed under GPL-3.0.
Fully integrated into Microsoft Excel and VBA.
Available with English and French interfaces.
Usable locally without cloud services or subscriptions.
Designed around transparent calculation rules and maintainable architecture.
Accessible without installing a separate application or Excel add-in.

Source code and documentation:
https://github.com/TMailletFR/ProjectEngine

Project website:
https://tmailletfr.github.io/ProjectEngine/

Thank you to everyone downloading, testing, sharing, and contributing ideas to ProjectEngine.

Real scheduling. Native Excel. Now with Financial Project Controls.

ProjectEngine v1.5.0 — Financial Project Controls & Multi-Project Management