Understand financial concepts in Focus
Atlassian Focus provides a powerful financial management solution that allows you to track budgets, costs, and benefits directly alongside your focus areas, work, and strategic goals. By integrating financial data with your work progress, you gain a 360-degree view of your initiatives, enabling better oversight and more informed decision making.
Funds in Focus is a planning and tracking tool designed to work alongside your organization's primary financial systems. It is not intended to replace your ERP, general ledger, or other financial systems of record. Use it to plan, forecast, and monitor initiative-level spending while your finance team maintains authoritative records in their core systems.
Benefits of using financial features
Using the financial features in Focus helps you:
Centralize financial oversight: Track budgets, costs, and benefits in a single location.
Monitor variance: Understand how actual spending and future projections diverge from your original plan (baseline).
Align with strategy: Categorize spending by investment types (e.g., "Run the Business" vs. "Change the Business") and expenditure classes (CapEx vs. OpEx).
Gain automated insights: Use our beta of Rovo’s AI-powered insights to monitor financial health, including "run-rate" and "over-budget" signals.
Core concepts
To effectively manage your funds, it is important to understand the following concepts:
Concept | Description |
|---|---|
Cost items | Items you create in or import to Focus to track specific costs for a focus area and/or linked work item. A cost item can represent labor or non-labor spend, be classified as CapEx or OpEx, and includes forecasted and actual values over time. |
Benefit items | Items you create in or import to Focus to track the monetary benefits that will be gained by delivering a focus area and/or linked work item. A benefit item can represent realized or projected gains, such as revenue increases, cost avoidance, cost reduction, productivity gains, or risk reduction, and includes forecasted and actual values over time. |
Forecasts | Editable fields within a cost item or benefit item that capture expected future spend or expected future benefit values, by month or reporting period. |
Actuals | Fields within a cost item or benefit item that capture spend that has already occurred or benefits that have already been realized. Actuals are used with forecasts to understand estimation accuracy and financial performance. |
Baselines | A plan-of-record snapshot that captures actual values for past months and forecast values for current and future months. Cost items and benefit items have separate baselines, set independently. Baselines provide the reference point used to compare current forecasts and actuals and track variance. |
Budgets | An editable value for a focus area that determines the amount of funding available. Compare forecasts against budgets when planning to ensure new ideas are within financial scope. Compare actuals against budgets to better understand funding that remains available for future work. |
Set up and administration
Funding features in Focus provide multiple permission controls to ensure financial data is recorded by those best suited to manage financials in your organization, as well as multiple customization options to categorize cost and benefit items with the language your teams use.
Group permissions
Admins use groups to manage who can view or edit focus areas and their associated financial data. You can set permissions for those who can view financial data, make changes to budgets, baselines, forecasts, and actuals, and export data.
Focus area permissions still apply to financial data. If a user does not have view or edit access to a specific focus area, they won't be able to access the financial data for that focus area, even if their group has funds permissions enabled. Funds permissions control what actions are available; focus area permissions control which focus areas those actions apply to.
Configuration options
Before your team starts entering financial data, an administrator should configure the following settings to match your organization's needs.
Site-wide settings control how financial data displays across all focus areas:
Fiscal year start month: determines how months are grouped into fiscal years and reporting intervals. Intervals are fixed at four quarters, calculated from the start month you select.
Currency: sets the currency symbol displayed site-wide. One currency per site. Changing the currency changes the display label only. No value conversion is performed.
Custom categories let you classify cost and benefit items with your organization's language. The categories you configure also determine how you can break down your financial data in charts.
Investment categories: strategic tags for classifying why money is being spent. For example, "Run the Business" vs. "Change the Business."
Cost types and sub-types: each cost item has a type (Labor or Non-labor) and a sub-type. Types are fixed and cannot be changed. Sub-types are custom categories that you create within each type. For example, "Contractors" or "Consultants" under Labor, and "Cloud infrastructure" or "Software licenses" under Non-labor.
Benefit types: categories for classifying benefit items, configured on the same administration page as cost types. For example, "Revenue increase," "Cost reduction," or "Productivity gain."
Expenditure class (CapEx and OpEx) is a standard financial classification applied to cost items that distinguishes between capital expenditure and operating expenditure. These values are built in and cannot be customized.
All financial classifications in Focus are configured by your team. Your administrators set up the categories, types, and sub-types that match your organization's financial structure, and your team members select the appropriate values when creating cost and benefit items. Focus does not automatically classify or categorize financial data.
For instructions on configuring these settings, see Configure Focus for financial data.
Ways to add and manage data
You can populate and update your financial data in Focus using three primary methods.
Manual creation
You can create and manage cost or benefit items directly within the Focus app. This method is ideal for making quick updates to monthly values, adding tags, or linking financial items to specific Jira or Jira Align work items.
CSV import
For bulk updates or migrating data from spreadsheets, you can use the CSV import tool. You can download a CSV template or upload a CSV file from within a single focus area's Funds tab. You can also use the Transfer Data page in Focus administration settings, which gives you the same download and upload options across all focus areas on the site.
API and integrations
For automated data syncing, Focus offers a public API. This allows you to integrate with third-party financial tools, timesheet solutions, or PPM tools to ensure your financial data is always up to date.
Where to review and inspect data
Each focus area includes a dedicated Funds tab where you can review the financial details connected to that area's work and strategic outcomes. The tab is divided into Costs and Benefits views, accessible via a toggle in the upper left corner. Each view brings together the relevant items, budgets, baselines, forecasts, and actuals so teams can understand how funding is being planned, spent, and realized over time.
The Funds tab also displays multiple charts that help you inspect key financial data at a glance, including forecast versus actuals, variance from the baseline, and performance against budgets. Use these views to identify where spending is tracking as expected, where forecasts have changed, and whether the focus area is staying within its available funding.
When viewing a parent focus area, financial data from its sub-focus areas rolls up into the parent's summary tiles, trend charts, and breakdown views. This lets you see the aggregate financial picture at the portfolio level without navigating into each sub-focus area individually.
Typical lifecycle of a cost or benefit item
Financial tracking in Focus follows a general cycle from planning through ongoing monitoring.
Create items: add cost or benefit items to a focus area to represent what you plan to spend or expect to gain.
Enter forecasts: project expected values month by month. Forecasts should evolve as plans become clearer.
Review against budget: compare total forecasts to the focus area's budget to confirm the plan is financially viable.
Set a baseline: once the plan is approved, capture the current state as your plan of record. This becomes the reference point for all future variance tracking.
Record actuals: as months close, enter real costs incurred or benefits realized. Actuals can come from finance systems, timesheets, CSV imports, APIs, or manual entry.
Refine forecasts: as time passes, update your forecast values for upcoming months to reflect what you know now. Estimates naturally become more accurate as the planning window shortens, and costs you didn't anticipate earlier may shift the picture significantly. Keeping forecasts current is what makes variance tracking meaningful.
Monitor variance: Focus compares your baseline, current forecasts, and actuals in charts and summary tiles. Use variance to spot where plans have shifted, where spend is trending above or below expectations, and where tradeoffs may be needed.
Re-baseline when needed: if variance becomes significant and your organization agrees on a revised plan, set a new baseline to establish a new plan of record. This resets variance tracking against the updated numbers.
This cycle repeats. Steps 5 through 7 are ongoing as each month closes and new information becomes available.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between cost items and Talent labor rates?
They are separate concepts. Focus shows labor rate estimates from Talent alongside your financial data, but they work independently. Talent labor rates are derived from positions and rate cards. Cost items are discrete financial line items you create or import to track planned and actual spend. Editing one does not affect the other.
What happened to EAC (Estimate at Completion)?
In Focus, "Forecast" replaces the traditional financial term "Estimate at Completion" (EAC). Similarly, "Remaining forecast" represents what other tools may call "Remaining estimates." If your organization uses EAC terminology, both concepts map to the same thing in Focus.
Can I track multiple currencies?
Focus supports one currency per site. The currency setting controls the display symbol only and does not perform any conversions. If you change from USD to EUR, existing values stay the same.
Can I set baselines for both costs and benefits?
Yes. Cost items and benefit items have separate baselines that are set independently. Setting a baseline for costs does not affect benefit baselines, and vice versa.
What data does a baseline capture?
A baseline uses actual values for past months and forecast values for current and future months. If a past month has no actual value, that month is excluded from the baseline.
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