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Timeline with Cost from Smartsheet

Keep track of Smartsheet project financials in your OnePager timeline

Lean how to create a project timeline in OnePager using data from Smartsheet, where each task includes both budgeted and actual cost. Track total spending over time, or slice and dice your project financials to find out which departments are contributing the most to the overall project cost.

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  1. We’ll begin with a project plan. This example uses Smartsheet, but you could just as easily work in Microsoft Project, Planisware, or Primavera P6. In this sheet, every task has a both a planned (budgeted) and actual cost:

    Smartsheet project plan with planned and actual costs assigned to each task.

    We can use OnePager to understand the total project cost over time, the cost by team, or by individual team member--whichever your leadership needs to see.

  2. Depending on how much detail you want to show in your project timeline, you may want to flag certain Smartsheet rows for display, like this:

    Select rows from Smartsheet.

  3. Create your initial project timeline by clicking the OnePager button on your desktop:

    Launch OnePager to import from Smartsheet.

  4. On the start screen, click NEW to start building a new project timeline. When the import wizard appears, connect to Smartsheet to import your project:

    Import from Smartsheet into OnePager to create a project timeline.

  5. Select your Smartsheet project, then click OK. Back on the import wizard, click Next followed by Create New Chart:

    Connect to OnePager to build a timeline from Smartsheet.

  6. OnePager will build your project timeline from Smartsheet, which will initially look something like this. In the next few steps, we'll bring in the budget information from Smartsheet and add it as a graph below the timeline.

    Timeline created from Smartsheet.

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Adding Cost to the Project Timeline

  1. To add cost to the project timeline that you created in previous steps, go to Home > Chart Properties > Graphs/Data Cells. We'll initially set up a pair of line graphs that track budgeted vs. actual cost on a quarterly basis.

    Settings to create a quarterly line graph of budgeted and actual costs for your Smartsheet timeline in OnePager.

    Notice that the graph has two series of data: The first series plots the budgeted cost as a dotted blue line, while the second series pluts actual cost as a solid green line.

  2. Click OK, and OnePager will two line graphs that track planned vs. actual cost along the bottom of the project timeline:

    OnePager timeline from Smartsheet, displaying quarterly project budget and comparing it to actual costs.

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Slicing and Dicing Project Cost by Department or Team Member

While the line graphs in the first part of this example clearly compare planned vs. actual project cost over time, leadership often needs to understand how much of a project's budget is allocated to a specific department or individual team members within each department. OnePager can slice and dice your cost data by one or both of these assignments to give you a more granular view of your project budget over time.

  1. Return to Home > Chart Properties > Graphs/Data Cells. Begin by changing the Graph Type for the first series (Budgeted Cost) to a Column. Then disable the second series, as we only need to look at budget, not actual cost for this example:

    Switch from a line graph to a column graph for project budget from Smartsheet.

  2. Click OK, and OnePager will create a quarterly column graph that looks at the project budget, based on the data imported from Smartsheet:

    Project timeline with a bar graph depicting project budget from Smartsheet.

  3. To slice and dice your budget by department, return to the Graphs/Data Cells tab and click the Pivot Series button. Enable vertical pivoting based on the Assigned To column from Smartsheet. OnePager will automatically assign a different color to each department working on tasks in your project:

    Color-code your budgetary bar graph by department.

  4. Click OK, and OnePager will slice and dice your budgetary bar graph so that it's clear how much of your quarterly project budget is going to each department:

    Quarterly stacked bar graph of quarterly project budget, broken out by department.

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Tracking Budget vs. Actual Cost by Phase

With our timeline now breaking out project budget by department, we no longer have the visual comparison of planned versus actual cost. Of course, we could add a second graph to the timeline to display this information, but an alternative option is to display the cost and budget numbers as text on the right-hand side of the chart. Here's how.

  1. Return to Home > Chart Properties and click on the Rows/Swimlanes tab. In the Text Columns section, click on the Right #1 tab and display data from the Budgeted Cost field in Smartsheet. Because this is a timeline with multiple tasks per row, we need to to sum across the entire phase so that the budget number we display covers all of the tasks in the phase. To do this, enable the Function option and set it to Sum:

    Add a text column that summarizes project budget based on each phase of the Smartsheet project.

  2. Now, we'll do the same thing for actual cost. Click on the Right #2 tab and display data from the Actual Cost field in Smartsheet. Again, enable the Function option and set it to Sum, so that our actual cost covers all tasks for each phase:

    Add a text column that summarizes project cost based on each phase of the Smartsheet project.

  3. Click OK. OnePager will add the columns for budgeted cost and actual cost to the right-hand side of the timeline for comparison:

    Project timeline created in OnePager from Smartsheet. It features a bar graph color-coded by department, and two columns that compare budgeted vs. actual cost for each phase of the project.

    4. Get started today by downloading a free trial.

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