Project Finances - allocation date

Question

I'm a novice when it comes to Project Finances inside of Workfront and the native reporting options available inside of Workfront. I'm hoping someone can help explain what date is being used in Workfront to pull an allocation date on a Project (Financial Data) report in regards to expenses. The allocation date is the only date option available for filters, views and groupings but it doesn't explicitly call this out anywhere on what it means in regards to expenses. 
 
The documentation around this is rough and mainly speaks to budgeted hours - aka labor.
 
This is from the glossary of terms - which doesn't seem to lay it out specifically but I'm feeling like it's the planned date of expenses since the budgeted hours would also be "planned" hours.

Allocation Date

You can find this field in the following types of reports:

Project (Financial Data)

Budgeted Hour

Financial information populates in Project (Financial Data) reports only when the data associated with it is less than 5 years old. For example, if a job role was allocated to a task in January 2015 and today is September 2021, a financial field like the Allocation Date for the job role does not populate in the Project (Financial Data) report.
 
For a Budgeted Hour report:

Build this report when trying to understand the amount of Budgeted Hours that is allocated to your resources or to your projects in the Resource Planner.

The Allocation Date is the first day (a Sunday) of the week for which you budgeted the hours in the Resource Planner.
TIP
If a week spans for two months, it will generate two rows in the report: one corresponding to the first day of the week (Sunday of the first week which is during the first month), and the second row displays the first day of the second month.
For example, if you budget 8 hours for a user for the week of June 30 (Sunday) - July 6 (Saturday), the two rows show an Allocation Date of June 30, and July 1.

KellieGardner · Accepted Answer

According to Chatgpt not much to do with actual project expenses just labor costs.

The allocation date field in a Project (Financial Data) report represents the date on which planned labor costs (allocations) are scheduled to occur.

In Workfront’s financial reporting, allocations are the planned costs tied to hours assigned to users or job roles. The allocation date anchors those costs on the project timeline, allowing the system to:

Spread planned costs across specific dates (for forecasting cash flow).
Align planned vs. actual labor costs when tracking budgets.
Roll up financial projections by week, month, or quarter depending on the report’s grouping.

So, when you see the allocation date column, it’s essentially telling you:

“This is the date when the planned cost for this project resource or role is recognized in the financial schedule.”

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